will be interesting to see if such impressive cost savings can be realized.

Conclusion

The NCCU VCL pilot is an extension of the VCL project begun at NC State and owes full attribution to the NC State team for its innovative work. But as users of the VCL, we aim to drive it to places where it might not go of its own accord. The VCL began at a public university; implicit in such work is the ethical obligation to allow the public to avail itself of its benefit, with the consent of its creators at NC State. Extensions of the VCL, including the NCCU pilot, are themselves innovations, because what is needed (once the science and engineering issues are addressed) is a replicable business model. The VCL has now been extended to NCCU, a relatively small public university, a significant accomplishment available to other organizations without large technology staffs.

VCL mainframe implications are significant. The VCL runs well on a distributed platform. All reports of performance and reliability in the current blade environment are positive. But virtualization has been part of the mainframe domain (such as IBM’s zVM) for decades. That it works is an understatement. To be able to have hundreds, even thousands, of virtual servers running on a mainframe with accompanying dramatic reduction in power demand is a development we are eager to see.

The VCL project is important to vir-
tualization technology in education for
four main reasons:
Though it began in the College of ˲
Engineering at NC State, and NC State
provides most of the technical direc-
tion, the project is developing an in-
creasingly eclectic profile. Participants
are able to apply innovation to the hard-
ware and software infrastructure and
still enjoy the benefits of being part of
the VCL environment. For example, if a
high school wants to use a homegrown
virtualization solution (perhaps for in-
structional purposes) and didn’t use
the VCL per se, accommodations could
be made for it to use VCL management
logic and networking, as long as its so-
lution does not impede other users;

For NCCU, development of exper- ˲ tise among internal staff and students

the VCL’s greatest
value is when an
entire institution,
across functional
units and academic
disciplines, uses it
to seamlessly
access computing
resources.

is invaluable. We are learning to deploy our production infrastructure more efficiently, and our students are acquiring a valuable and marketable skill set involving virtualization;

For the predominantly African- ˲
American community served by NCCU,
the related technology transfer is espe-
cially welcome. As we work with high
schools in our area, the community at
large is involved directly in technologi-
cal innovation at a much deeper level
than it ever was before; and
With the emergence of cloud com- ˲
puting, 7 the VCL might also serve as a
major cloud application, becoming yet
another software service for the world
at large while delivering services from
commercial vendors.

Though commercial solutions may provide the same or similar results for the same or lower cost, they don’t (as far as we see) allow our extended community (particularly in North Carolina) to directly participate in the ongoing innovation. However, in many ways this participation is as vital to us as the benefit derived from the technology itself.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to NC State, Duke University, International Business Machines, and MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC.

 

References

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3. Gaspar, A. et al. The role of virtualization in computing education. ACM sIGCsE bulletin 40, 1 (Feb. 2008), 131–132.

4. Kusnetzky, D. IbM announces the z10: Is the mainframe still relevant? ZDnet (Feb. 18, 2008); http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=351&tag=rbx ccnbzd1

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Cameron Seay ( [e-mail]) is an assistant professor of computer information systems in the school of business at north Carolina Central university, Durham, nC. Gary Tucker ( [e-mail]) is a technology analyst at bank of America in Charlotte, nC.