DIGITAL LIBRARY
APPROACH FOR ENHANCING STUDENT EDUCATION USING CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES FOR MIDDLE EAST COLLEGE
Middle East College (OMAN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN15 Proceedings
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 6862-6869
ISBN: 978-84-606-8243-1
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 6-8 July, 2015
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
In the modern world where Information Technology is playing a vital role, and increasing competitive pressures, institutions are challenged to do more with their networks. Maximizing the usability and performance of communication networks – to make them highly reliable and running hybrid applications, can add complexity and budget to companies’ who already have limited resources. Virtualization techniques have matured day by day and networking infrastructure scale and efficiency has been optimized, more organizations are now moving mission-critical applications to virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization enjoys popularity in the information technology world as it has proven itself as an ideal solution of data centre growth and provides the benefits of increased utilization of servers, power savings, and reduced server footprint. [4] Datacenters operate round the clock, and access to continuous connectivity and real time information is required, technology is capable of successfully bring the two together. This paper discusses on an approach to provide a solution for Virtual labs using a Private Cloud. This will accommodate various major features and services of a Typical Cloud environment without any compromise on the basic services. This will add flexibility to include any services in the network without having any extra pressure of Network Management.

Cloud computing is fundamentally dependent on the network to connect the Cloud service provider with the consumer. For those who have redundant network connections with robust bandwidth this will not be an issue, but for those who do not, serious consideration should be given concerning singular dependence on network-based offerings, and how business continues when the network is unavailable or unreliable. A private cloud provides all of those benefits plus highly integrated and automated management, scalable and elastic platforms, and self-service IT infrastructure. [14] Through a highly automated infrastructure, an organization can reduce operational costs by automating tasks that previously required manual intervention. Research reveals that most of the vendors have changed their direction to support this concept and most of the large companies have implemented it or planning to implement it in the coming future [3].

The primary reasons for choosing cloud architecture in this research is to provide elasticity and scalability into the datacenter using automation, resource pooling, and dynamic provisioning feature of cloud environment. Automating repetitive tasks helps to reduce errors and increase speed. Automation also makes the datacenter more resilient, with pre-defined processes to handle unexpected spikes in demand. By pooling resources for compute, storage, and networking, workloads can be moved more easily and load-balance across the whole infrastructure. And enhanced management capabilities allow provision and deploy applications faster.
Keywords:
Cloud Computing, Cloud, IaaS, Distributed Computing, Virtualization.