Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How university IT departments can make money selling spare compute cycles through SpotCloud


[A very innovative  Canadian startup called Enomaly is offering a service called SpotCloud that allows IT departments to sell spare compute cycles into the global cloud market.
This service has been featured in the Economist magazine and other media outlets. Spotcloud may be an ideal opportunity for university IT departments and research groups to earn a little additional money and familiarize themselves with the advantages of commercial cloud services. Already university consortia in the US and elsewhere are exploring using the SpotCloud service internally as part of their own offering or using the Enomaly public service .  Universities, generally, have seasonal loads on their servers and so have long periods of underutilized servers that could be offered up to SpotCloud.  It is also ideal for many of the new distributed  green clouds being deployed on farms and at stranded windmills. The recent Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Clarkson university project is a good example of this approach.  Spotcloud allows them to quickly offer commercial cloud services without going through the messy process of SLAs etc. It is also a great opportunity for small business to experiment using and offering cloud services – BSA]


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