SM: What are the vendors that are involved in this process at HMS? What roles and responsibilities are the vendors playing, and how do you evaluate them and bring them in? What are some of your criteria for vendor evaluation?

MA: The vendors that are involved are Platform Computing for one. They are the vendor for cloud and cluster management software. Most of the hardware on the computational side is IBM BladeCenter servers. We have Cisco as the network fabric provider, and we use storage from a company called Isilon high performance network attached storage (NAS). So that is pretty much the mix of hardware vendors that we have.

Our process for evaluating vendors is primarily about piloting. We take an agile development approach with out cloud implementation similar to the one people are taking in software development. We start with the design requirements; we meet with users and then look at what our software options are. Next, we try it out and see how it works, and we build on our successes. We do change course where things are not meeting our needs. There are specific things we knew needed to happen. We knew we need hardware vendor that had reliable hardware and would give us support services we needed. We needed cloud software that could support scale from hundreds to thousands of nodes and give us the flexibility to be able to provide these services where we guarantee certain parts of the cloud to certain researchers and that sort of thing. Overall it is an iterative process to find the requirements and pilot them and see how it helps the research work at HMS.

MORE >>