Page 8 - CT Innovation in Education, 2021

Innovation in Education | RED HAT – learn more at redhat.com
Evolving with IT
to Support Research
Modernizing the campus approach to IT infrastructure for supporting research has never been so urgent.
WHILE INSTITUTIONS HAVE EXPRESSED continuing concern about wobbling tuition and ancillary dollars, one source of revenue remains healthy for higher education: COVID-19 research funded
by federal and state programs. The full measure, from community colleges to Research 1s, are at the forefront of projects to develop vaccines; uncover the sources of coronavirus and its evolving replication patterns; create new initiatives for public health response; understand the impact of the virus on various populations; study the physical and mental health and learning effects of prolonged quarantine; and explore numerous other facets..
However, the heightened attention on campus research comes with a continuing challenge: how to keep up with IT infrastructure needs, typically assembled once the grant funding arrives. Since many of these recent grants are short- term, turnaround time can be tight. In many cases, research teams are going from near-zero infrastructure to running
as quickly as possible — and not just serving applications to users, but storing, processing and sharing astronomical amounts of data.
In addition, the workloads for these research initiatives are constantly changing. It’s no longer about starting up
an application and letting it run for days, weeks or months. The researchers need to do their data crunching quickly and then move on to the next job — in other words, spin up huge amounts of compute as quickly as possible and then spin it back down.
“Containing” the Challenges
Researchers have pursued two routes in addressing their needs, each with its limitations:
ƒ Going out and buying as much compute as possible to accommodate peak demand. Those resources may then sit unused during the times when researchers aren’t running their applications.
ƒ Turning to the public cloud. Even then, not all data 8 | SPONSORED CONTENT
Damien Eversmann
Delivery Strategist for Higher Education, North America Public Sector, Red Hat
can be maintained in the cloud; some of it has to stay on-premise by virtue of its sensitivity, restriction or regulation.
Neither solution fully allows researchers to put the right workload in the right place at the right time and do so efficiently without wasting IT resources.
Here’s where containerization — the next evolution in helping IT make more efficient use of existing technology — comes into play. The container concept can serve as either an alternative or a companion to virtualization. All of the code and its dependencies, such as configuration files and libraries, are packaged or contained. The benefit is portability: The software is abstracted away from the operating system and runs consistently and reliably on whatever infrastructure is available — on-premise, in the cloud or in a virtualized setting.
The container concept can serve as either an alternative or a companion to virtualization. All of the code and its dependencies, such as configuration files and libraries, are packaged or contained.
Hardware that was formerly running multiple virtual machines (each with its own instance of the operating system \[OS\] and instance of the application) now can host dozens
or even hundreds of applications, all sharing the same OS kernel in a lightweight approach. As a result, universities
can migrate applications from monolithic systems to containerized applications and repurpose hardware they already have to run those applications more effectively.
Open Source Management Oversight
Since nobody lives 100% in the cloud or on-premise, what’s also needed is a platform that accommodates management across the board. Red Hat OpenShift has found a home in many schools for good reason: It includes an enterprise- grade operating system (Linux) with a heavy emphasis