Managing the hybrid cloud in a university environment

he University of Bristol began its move to hybrid cloud when Keith Woolley joined as CIO in 2018. He sits down with James Pearce to discuss the next phase of its transition, working with VMware, and the uni’s award-winning AI projects

Being appointed to a role where you are tasked with overhauling a significant amount of legacy technology can be daunting for any tech leader but being asked to do so in the world of academia – where being at the cutting edge is vital, because students and academics are the very people pushing that edge, could be overwhelming.

When Keith Woolley joined the University of Bristol in 2018, he found a range of primarily Microsoft-based legacy infrastructure across the University’s IT footprint that, he acknowledges, were in need of a major refresh.

Moving from the world of private enterprise to academia was that he’d taken on a completely different type of challenge, with significantly more diversity in the tech stack at the University.

“We wanted technologies that could virtualise correctly, and we were struggling,” the Bristol Uni CDIO says, as he sits down with TechInformed in Barcelona.

“We actually went out to tender to see if there was a really good basis to switch our hypervisor out,” he adds.

This led Woolley to a company he had worked with in previous roles, such as his time as CIO of housing association the Home Group: VMware.

At the time, the now Broadcom-owned company was outlining its roadmap for its VMware Cloud Foundation platform. VCF is a multi-cloud infrastructure approach that delivers full-stack hyper-convergence to any on-premise environment.

“We quickly realised that where they were going with VCF, which was embryonic at the time, could combine with our strategy to potentially open a different doorway for us,” he explains.

Woolley says he was challenged from within the organisation over which environment was better: hybrid cloud or private cloud data centres. But, he adds, VCF removes the need to make that choice.

“VMware has been able to give us a clear definition of where we sit in the marketplace, but if we want to use the hyperscalers, we can still do that, which was always part of our strategy.

“We were able to go to the actual technology stack in the marketplace and assess what can get us to where we need to be.”

The need to virtualise became even more urgent in 2020, as the world descended into chaos thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.

For Bristol, the agreement struck with VMware the previous year allowed Woolley and his team to move resources to the cloud rapidly. This wasn’t just beneficial for the University, however, but for the world, as the University of Bristol was one of the partners working with the World Health Organisation to develop a vaccine through spin-out Imophoron.

Woolley explains: “We were able to assist with the COVID and the COVID vaccination because we could stand platforms up. So, these were things that we were seeing very early benefit from a very embryonic solution that we brought in.”

Bristol continued to migrate workloads to VCF and by VMware’s Explore event in November, the University had moved as many as 70% of its workloads to the platform. Woolley says Bristol uses VCF to pool its GPU, CPU, storage and memory resources flexibly without taking on more physical capability.

 

Research

As CDIO at Bristol, he runs 5,500 GPUs, 6,500 CPUs and 27 petabytes of storage daily – and that can be costly, he acknowledges.

It isn’t just corporate workloads that the University has moved to VCF, with research projects supporting innovative tech such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence also operating through VMware.

VCF also provides the basis for Bristol’s research into other research areas, including Bristol’s Reality Emulator, which is a standalone data centre that allows students and researchers to develop digital twins.

“It is a set of tools designed to help people create digital twins of certain environments and put people into a space where they visualise things,” he explains. It’s a three-dimensional space you can step inside, where high-resolution images appear in real-time. We also present images via VR and headsets.”

Beyond this, Bristol University’s hybrid strategy has also helped it win a £225 million investment to create the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI, which was announced in 2023, and is set to be 10x more powerful than the UK’s fastest supercomputer.

 

Reshaping the industry

 “One of my priorities will be to ensure we deliver that technology securely over the next 12 to 18 months, so we can have a national infrastructure for AI in the UK – and that’s a massive responsibility,” says Woolley.

Six years into the relationship with VMware, Woolley is already looking to the future and how they can extend their partnership to a decade and beyond. This, he adds, allows his team to bring stability to Bristol University.

“The roadmap might change, and we will have to tweak it when we need to, but I’m not in a position where I think I will need to switch out from VCF in the near future. That makes it sensible for us to sit down with VMware and have a clear understanding of what we are going to do going forward.”

But Woolley acknowledges that increasing cloud costs has been a challenge across industry, and something he is monitoring closely.

“Higher education is in a unique place because a lot of the cloud providers are very sympathetic towards the way we operate,” he explains.

“But I do think the industry is going to have to reshape because there is going to come a point where the cost of ownership will be truly questioned. But we’re seeing it right across the entire tech industry, especially with the growth of AI.”

Woolley expresses concern that there is a lack of transparency over why costs are rising so quickly.

“People would be a lot more sympathetic to what is happening if there was more transparency. But at some point, we’re going to have to look at the overall ecosystem. But that comes down to the leadership within organisations.

“It is my job to make sure I’m balancing the cost-benefit. I am responsible for making sure the University has the right level of technology to execute against its research and academic endeavour – that it is fit for purpose.

“We have a finite income, and we can’t pass cost increases into our client base, so whatever cost increases we see, I have to find a way of absorbing that. And that means really looking closely at where we put our workloads.”

 

AI awards

 For Woolley and his team, their primary goal is to create a frictionless experience for Bristol’s academics, researchers and students, so that they are able to take advantage of the institution’s technological resources.

“The University is very aware that for it to be successful, digital is a core platform, and we have made significant investments over the past five years,” he says. “My challenge now is to make sure that we deliver the second chapter of our digital strategy.”

What does that look like?

“I want to provide frictionless, single sign-on,” he replies. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You’re secure, you’re safe, and you don’t need to leave your coffee shop to come into our university.”

It also means integrating AI and capitalising on the current boom. As a tech research hub, AI is a particularly hot topic at Bristol with several research projects into the technology already underway. In fact, last year, the University was crowned “AI University of the Year” at the inaugural National AI Awards, something Woolley is proud of.