Cloud Infrastructure & Applications - CloudIA

The idea behind Cloud Computing is to deliver Platform-as-a-Services (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) over the Internet on an easy pay-per-use business model. To harness the potentials of Cloud Computing for e-Learning and research purposes, and to Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), the Hochschule Furtwangen University (HFU) establishes a new project, called Cloud Infrastructure & Applications (CloudIA).

The CloudIA project is a market-oriented Cloud infrastructure that leverages different virtualization technologies, by supporting Service-Level Agreements (SLA) for various service offerings. In addition, there are several unique features of CloudIA, such as overbooking of physical hardware to run more virtual machines (VMs), Single-Sign-On using Shibboleth, which simplifies an integration of external services (e.g. with Google Apps), special pre-staged VMs (e.g. Servlet Container and Online Learning and Training (OLAT) VMs), and creating personalized VMs on demand. Therefore, the CloudIA project offers better resource utilization, and helps SMEs and HFU staff and students to increase productivity. As a result, IT costs can be reduced.

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