UCloud: A simulated Hybrid Cloud for a university environment

Universities all around the world play a vital role in improving the society. But in the current economic crisis, they are facing difficulties in providing necessary resources for research and educational purposes. The solution of this problem is in the use of Cloud Computing. It is a new distributive computing model which provides applications and services over the Internet. In this paper, we investigate, study, and simulate a cloud for a university environment. We propose an architecture based on the hybrid cloud model which uses both the public and private clouds. It consists of two main parts, i.e., the Cloud Management System and the Hybrid Cloud. The proposed architecture is simulated using CloudSim. The evaluation of this architecture is performed for two separate scenarios. In the first one, the number of tasks is kept constant; and in the second, the number of tasks is changed. The results obtained are encouraging and support the use of a hybrid cloud solution for a university. The public cloud is used only to get a better performance or when the load is too high for the private cloud. The results show that high performance can be obtained while keeping the cost low.