An upstate New York college sees great economic advantage by running cloud computing on a mainframe.

On one mainframe, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., runs 630 virtual servers. Some of them are dedicated to computer sciences, some for web sites, and some for client and/or partner organizations. The end users don't know they are on a mainframe; they think they have their own server.

"The advantage of using a mainframe is tremendous," said Bill Thirsk, chief information officer at Marist College. "One of the applications that we use for managing the school...requires 10 large servers to run the entire suite of programs. We didn't buy 10 machines; we simply put it on our mainframe, which pre-existed."

A mainframe is highly efficient as far as the power, cooling, and floor space needed.

"My data center is only 2,000 square feet," Thirsk said, "yet I have in total probably 630 servers running in there. It takes your computing room, your heating and cooling, your power requirement, and your processing requirement and puts them into what I call an extremely high-density services model."

A mainframe that is virtualized into many smaller servers does not need network switches, cables, additional electrical outlets, more UPS capacity, racks, or any other additional equipment, Thirsk said. It's infinitely scalable, too.

"The price tag is expensive. However, it's much less than buying server, server, server, server," Thirsk said. "The return on that asset is considerably higher than doing one server at a time, one switch at a time."

iLearn

Marist College developed its own version of the open-source education platform Sakai, which it calls iLearn. Through its cloud, Marist runs iLearn internally and distributes it to partner organizations.

"We started to see that, very much so, we were offering Software as a Service through our instructional technology," Thirsk said. "We developed it so not only could a student sign up and take courses online, but we could also host [the software] for other [organizations], where we simply create them an instance and provide them access to our mainframe."

Marist College often helps other schools and colleges teach courses online, do online collaboration, and set up virtualization. "We are very much a hub," Thirsk said.

Transparency

Like all clouds, the technology behind Marist's interface is transparent. Students at Marist College don't think to themselves, "I'm logging into a cloud" when they use their secure login.

Anything students or faculty would do on a traditional computer, they can do online through the cloud, and usually with much greater convenience, at any time of the day, Thirsk said.

They can register, take a course, look up grades, pay bills, search the library catalog, collaborate online for team projects, go back and forth in asynchronous conversation, post documents and presentations, and access social-networking sites like Facebook.