SFU Cloud - Features & Benefits

Features & Benefits of SFU Cloud

Elastic

• Increase or decrease capacity within seconds.
• Provision one or several virtual machines simultaneously.
• Eliminate wastage of reserved capacity by changing CPU, memory, disk and network on-demand on a running VM.
• Provides developers the tools to build highly available applications and protect them from common failure scenarios.

Owner Controlled

• Have complete control of your systems including full administrative access and the ability to interact with the systems as you would with any traditionally-hosted physical machines.
• Shut down or pause any system while retaining the data, and use the user portal to restart the same instance back to operation.
• Access server consoles and take point-in-time snapshots to confidently apply server changes.

Hosting Choices 

• Deploy multiple operating systems
• Apply software packages to shape the platform that suits your business application needs.
• Define and configure memory, CPU and disk size that is optimal for your application and change configurations dynamically

Institutionally Integrated

• Tightly integrated and embedded in the SFU Data Centre allowing systems to leverage SFU’s high-bandwidth networking and advanced data protection.

Highly Reliable 

• Provides  a highly redundant and reliable environment that is in-line with the SFU Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan.
• Critical systems are geo-replicated to a satellite data centre providing backup against a major disaster.
• Systems are backed up daily and provide RTOs that are in-line with IT Services’ backup and restore retention policy and recovery objectives.

Secure

• Integrates with SFU Federated Authentication for secure web service access and subsequent system access.
• Keeps your workloads and data isolated and safe from external threats and other tenants.
• Complies with provincial and federal privacy laws.

Economical 

• SFU Cloud passes on to you the monetary benefits of running in-house infrastructure at scale in the most optimal matter
• Leveraging highly skilled IT professionals
• Providing disciplined hardware and software acquisition practices, combined with favorable pricing available to educational institutions.

Deployment and Management of Virtual Assets

• User manual for deploying virtual machines and managing virtual assets via SFU Cloud Portal. See attachment (SFU Cloud Portal Documentation.pdf)