IBM: OpenStack at NDSU

Project Details

Last year IBM approached NDSU to have a computer science capstone group implement an OpenStack environment on campus as a proof-of-concept, higher education oriented open source private cloud. The task was a huge success and expectations were greatly surpassed by what the group was able to accomplish. IBM would now like to continue what was started last year by having another group further the development and utilization of the cloud at NDSU. Through this capstone project, IBM is able to further their relationship with the university and to explore the benefits of this type of platform in higher education. This also allows them to contribute more as a corporate sponsor to OpenStack and also aid in its deployment to locations that are able to benefit from the opportunities that OpenStack makes possible.

OpenStack creates an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that provisions computing resources to provide various cloud-based services. The group's primary responsibility was to reach out to the faculty and staff in the department to develop use cases for the cloud. The group configured and delivered a fully-functional production instance of OpenStack running on the latest release (Grizzly) to the department. In addition several components were added to customize the environment for the department, including elastic hadoop to automate deployment of clusters using a REST API or the OpenStack dashboard.