Cloud Bioinformatics in a Private Cloud Deployment

Cloud Bioinformatics in a Private Cloud Deployment

Victor Chang
Copyright: © 2015 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6539-2.ch113
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Abstract

This chapter describes service portability for a private cloud deployment, including a detailed case study about Cloud Bioinformatics services developed as part of the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). The Cloud Bioinformatics design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture, and user support. Bioinformatics applications are written on the SAN-based private cloud, which can simulate complex biological sciences and present them in a way that anyone without prior knowledge can understand. Several bioinformatics results are discussed, particularly brain segmentation, which demonstrates different parts of the brain simulated by the private cloud. In addition, benefits of CCAF are illustrated using several bioinformatics examples such as tumour modelling, brain imaging, insulin molecules, and simulations for medical training. The Cloud Bioinformatics solution offers cost reduction, time-saving, and user friendliness.
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1. Introduction

Healthcare informatics has played a strategic role in the National Health Service (NHS) and has been influential to the way in the IT project development for different NHS Trusts. The ICT initiatives include Cloud Computing, which has investigations to understand how to process with Cloud adoption and the capacity to maximise the added value as a result of Cloud adoption. Cloud Computing offers a variety of benefits including cost-saving, agility, efficiency, resource consolidation, business opportunities and Green IT (Chang et al., 2010a; 2010b; 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2013a; 2013b; Kangermann et al., 2011). As more organisations adopt Cloud, the need for a standard, or a framework to manage both operation management and IT services is emerging. This framework needs to provide the structure necessary to ensure any Cloud implementation meets the business needs of industry and academia and include recommendations of best practices which can be adapted for different domains and platforms. Our framework is called the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). It helps organisations to achieve good Cloud design, implementation and services (Chang et al., 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; 2011d; 2011e; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2013a; 2013b; Chang & Wills, 2013; Chang, 2013a; 2013b; 2013c). CCAF may be used from service strategy to design, development, test and user support stages. The CCAF seeks to address two problems in particular:

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    Calculating risk and return analysis of a large computer system adoption such as Cloud adoption systematically and coherently.

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    Risk mitigation to migration of the Cloud.

1.1 Service Portability for Cloud Deployment

This paper focuses on service portability which is the term we use to describe a recommended approach to Cloud adoption that plays an important role in having a smooth transition to the Cloud environment. Service portability also influences the design and implementation of healthcare bioinformatics services. Beaty et al. (2009) and Chang et al. (2011a; 2012c; 2013) identify portability as an adoption challenge for organisational Cloud adoption. Although it is domain specific as there are different requirements for portability in each domain, communication between different types of clouds supplied by different vendors can be difficult to implement. Often work-arounds are needed which entail writing additional layers of APIs, or an interface or portal (Beaty et al., 2009; Armbrust et al., 2009).

Service portability (portability in short) is illustrated using examples from Cloud bioinformatics projects in the Healthcare industry where portability is influential in migrating the existing platforms and applications to the Cloud and later developing new applications and services. Bioinformatics is provided using in-house private clouds, initially to provide a working IaaS infrastructure for medical databases, images and analysis in a secure and collaborative environment. These Cloud projects have been successfully delivered and provide a high level of user satisfaction and were followed up with further work to upgrade from IaaS to PaaS, which allows greater benefits, including better efficiency and better management of resources.

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