Why the Massachusetts Open Cloud Project Is a Big Deal

A project team of academia and industry experts is making headway on a multimillion-dollar cloud computing initiative announced by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in April.

If all goes as planned, the three-year project, known as the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), will pave the way for cloud consumers to customize infrastructure and platform services to best meet their needs. Patrick is hopeful that MOC’s public cloud computing infrastructure will spur Big Data innovation in the state.

Boston University leads the MOC project team. The MOC project received $3 million in state funding, according to Azer Bestavros. “We have commitments of up to $20 million from universities and industry.” MOC is an architecture and a model for other governments, he adds.

Cisco, Intel, Red Hat and Juniper Networks are among the growing number of companies partnering with the MOC project. Academia partners include Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jan Mark Holzer, a senior consulting engineer at Red Hat, says his company is helping MOC build the cloud infrastructure around OpenStack. Red Hat has moved some hardware into the MOC-designated data center and will continue to install hardware and software for at least the next six months. Hozer stressed that the MOC and its member partners are not interested in promoting a particular vendor or product. It’s an open project.

Hozer says he is hopeful that MOC will be open for research use fairly soon, which could mean months, rather than years.

It’s too early to say how much the MOC services will cost, but the price points have to be competitive because agencies aren’t required to use the services.