Idea as we heard it

A lot of research project require servers to collect, store and process data.  Setting up an enterprise ready server, such as those provided through SOSC is not cost effective for many research projects.  Instead of purchasing those services from IS&T, departments that have concentrated and ongoing needs for such services for their research are likely to either go to external cloud services like Amazon or setup internal clouds maintained by their local IT resources.

It is an interesting idea of MIT providing an internal cloud computing resource that could be a pay as you go model like those of Amazon, but could be more standard for researchers and not subject to an external vendor.  VMware would be something to explore for this type of function and they are working with a number of cloud computing providers to standardize on the virtual machine configuration so something could move from an internal environment to an externally hosted service and back again as demand and performance dictated.

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