Towards a "Cloud Enabled" University Computer Center

An educational environment must constantly keep up with ever-changing Information Technologies. Therefore, computer center administrators of universities must overcome the increasingly expensive effort of providing up to date facilities. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), is a technical university, where students gain hands-on practical experience in computer laboratories as an essential complement to lectures they attend. NTUA's computer laboratories have to be highly flexible and configurable for a variety of applications: from the implementation of a wide range of computer networks, to the incorporation of computer-aided engineering/manufacturing(CAE/CAM) software. Traditional system and network administration practices are usually complicated in terms of configuration and maintenance and generally lack flexibility and scalability. We discuss the architecture of a personalized cloud-based solution for the specific needs of educational institutions. The goals are high utilization of resources and minimization of the administration effort needed to maintain physical laboratories, achieved by the centralized integration of computing, storage, network and application facilities. Such a centralized integration utilizes the high-speed network interconnections of the university campus and takes advantage of the broadband technologies that are globally available outside of it. We introduce NTUA's "Central Cloud Front" (CCF) to prove the concept of the proposed architecture.