Interconnected Private Clouds for Universities and Researchers

OpenCloudMesh is a joint international initiative under the umbrella of the GÉANT Association that is built on ownCloud’s open Federated Cloud sharing application programming interface (API) taking Universal File Access beyond the borders of individual Clouds and into a globally interconnected mesh of research clouds — without sacrificing any of the advantages in privacy, control and security an on-premises cloud provides. OpenCloudMesh provides a common file access layer across an organization and across globally interconnected organizations, whether the data resides on internal servers, on object storage, in applications like SharePoint or Jive, other ownClouds, or even external cloud systems such as Dropbox and Google (syncing them to desktops or mobile apps, making them available offline).

„In the research area data must not only be under control of scientists. We have to be able to share them with our partners easily and secure without creating data silos. For this reason, we are helping other research institutions to implement their private cloud storage and encourage everyone to participate in the construction of an open standard for data exchange.“

Dr. Thomas Hildmann, Project-Lead of Project „ownCloud-Implementation an DFN-Cloud at TU Berlin“

„The ERCIS - European Research Center for Information Systems - is an international network of universities, organisations, and scientists, conducting cooperative research in the field of Information Systems. For such a network, the exchange of sensitive data is crucial. OpenCloudMesh is ideal to support our collaboration!”

Dr. Armin Stein, Managing Director, ERCIS

"SWITCH, the Swiss research and education network, welcomes open standards. We think that cross platform and cross institutional sync and share services are an important step towards connecting researchers across institutions and countries and welcome the OpenCloudMesh initiative as a viable step in that direction. SWITCHdrive, an ownCloud based service, already connects 27 Swiss Universities today and its users will further benefit from this development."

Dr Andreas Dudler, Managing Director of SWITCH

“We are at a critical juncture in cloud computing. There is no longer a need to choose between privacy and security and collaboration and ease of use. We believe OpenCloudMesh will redefine the way people use the cloud to share their important files.”

Peter Szegedi, Project Development Officer, Management Team, GÉANT Association

OpenCloudMesh currently involves the following institutions:

• CERN
• Sciebo , the 500k user Campuscloud
• University of Florida
• SWITCH
• SURF 
• University of Hawaii – Manoa, College of Education
• University of Vienna
• AARNet
• Garching Computing Centre of the Max-Planck-Society
• GÉANT Association
• DESY Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
• ETH Zürich
• ERCIS – European Research Center for Information Systems
• TU Berlin

"OpenCloudMesh is ideally suited to improve the storage cloud service offerings within the Max Planck Society given its distributed nature with more than 80 individual research institutes throughout Germany and beyond."

Dr. Raphael Ritz, Head of Data Division, Garching Computing Centre of the Max Planck Society

"Sciebo is one of Germany's biggest sync&share projects and implemented jointly by 22 universities in North Rhine Westphalia. Since a fast data exchange in teaching and research becomes more important in many modern scientific fields, we are striving for a reliable and secure backbone for this task. We are applying a multiple server site concept and therefore we are relying on the server-to-server sharing feature. Our aim is to offer a transparent and easy user experience which also should be compatible with alternative solutions of external co-operation partners. Thus, we are calling for an open and standardized solution as promised by the OpenCloudMesh protocol."

Dr. Raimund Vogl, Head of ZIV, Univeristiy of Münster

"For many years scientists at DESY have been exchanging data with partners
worldwide. The systems used to do that change with time and we feel that
sharing data over a network of federated private clouds is fitting the
needs of users today. This is why we are exited to work on the Open Cloud Mesh"

Peter van der Reest, Head of Information Fabrics Group, Information Technology, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, A Research Centre of the Helmholtz Association

“Enabling collaboration between scholars and researchers is crucial to make progress on the problems of today. For this reason the universities in the state of Florida are working on a collaborative storage infrastructure and the ownCloud software is part of that infrastructure. The functionality was demonstrated recently at SC14 http://news.it.ufl.edu/research/new-storage-system-simplifies-bigdata-sharing/”

Dr. Erik Deumens, Director UF Research Computing, University of Florida

Interested in learning more? Complete the form to speak with someone about how your organization can join OpenCloudMesh.