OURcloud

OU Research Cloud (OURcloud) is an internal research cloud resource that is available to OU employees and their research collaborators (including student researchers).

OURcloud can also be used for coursework. One can buy one or more portions of OURcloud, where each portion is 2 virtual CPU cores plus 16 GB of RAM. The price is $347.19 per such portion, a one-time up-front purchase (not a recurring charge), good for 7 years. And, an individual purchase from external funds (such as a grant) of more than $5,000 (at least 15 portions) isn't subject to Indirect Costs.

Virtual Servers: An OURcloud virtual server can consist of one or more OURcloud portions, up to the physical limit of the OURcloud hardware.

CPUs: Each OURcloud portion has 2 virtual CPU cores, which corresponds to 2/3 of a physical CPU core. That is, OURcloud's virtual CPU cores are 3:1 oversubscribed (3 virtual CPU cores per physical CPU core), which is common in cloud environments.

RAM: Each OURcloud portion has 16 GB of physical RAM, non-oversubscribed (you get the full 16 GB).

Disk: Each OURcloud virtual server comes with 30 GB of free disk space for each user, backed up nightly, for your software, scripts, small input files, etc. For larger storage, you can purchase OURdisk. You can have OURdisk space that's available only on your OURcloud virtual server(s), or available on both your OURcloud virtual server(s) and on OU IT's supercomputer. Note that OURdisk is never backed up, but see below.

Tape: If you're using OURdisk, we strongly urge that you also buy tape cartridges for the OURRstore tape archive. This is because OURdisk is never backed up. But, you can archive files from OURdisk to OURRstore tape.

Questions about OURcloud? Contact support@oscer.ou.edu.

Features

Total Capacity

OURcloud's initial total capacity is 126 portions (2000+ GB RAM, 250+ virtual CPU cores), and this will grow with demand.

Operating Systems

An OURcloud virtual server can run Linux or Windows (but not MacOS, iOS or Android).

• For Linux, we have certain versions already available. If you want a specific version of Linux that's not yet provided, it might be able to be added, depending on the details.
• For Windows, we offer the latest stable version of Windows Datacenter, which allows up to 2 remote logins at a time. You can have more than 2 remote logins at a time for a modest upcharge.

Availability

OURcloud is available on demand, 24 x 7 x 365 (except during maintenance outages). Unlike commercial cloud resources, OURcloud isn't charged by the core-hour or instance-hour. Instead it is a one-time, up-front purchase that is good for 7 years, that also gives you and your team unrestricted remote access.

Access

OURcloud is available via remote access only.

Maintenance

The OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER), a division of OU IT, provides basic setup and maintenance. For anything beyond basic setup and maintenance, your team (or a system administrator you arrange) will maintain your virtual server -- OSCER doesn't provide that service.

Other Software

You may install other software on your OURcloud virtual server.

Reliability

OURcloud is provided on an as-is, best-effort basis. OURcloud includes an OU IT-funded failover server. If an OURcloud physical server fails, the virtual servers running on the failed physical server can migrate to the failover server. Historically, the service has achieved ~99% uptime, which translates to ~100 hours of downtime per year (~1 business day of downtime per month on average).

There are no "Egress" charges for downloading your data. You can download data from your OURcloud virtual server at no charge, at any time.