Educational services in cloud with IBM technology: A new model for open, on demand learning in higher education

The paper describes a cloud implementation for a consortium of four universities used for on demand education. The cloud infrastructure allow a better resource allocation for laboratories, customizations of the working environment, on demand class setup and more other features which allow improvements in the learning processes. The infrastructure is composed by two IBM CloudBurst 2.1 infrastructures, located in two different geographical locations, connected by a high speed fiber optic connection, allowing fault tolerance, high availability and virtual machine relocation. The system is used by four universities: University Politehnica of Bucharest, University “Transilvania” of Brasov, Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest and University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila” of Bucharest. The paper is composed by six sections: an introduction presenting the actual context in for education services and the necessity for cloud computing in education, a section which describes the hardware and software architecture of the system, then the virtual machine management and monitoring system is presented, followed by section which discusses about the e-learning system implemented, the SSKE (Service Science Knowledge Environment) system is presented in another section, and the paper finishes by a conclusions section presenting further developments and first results.