Disaster Recovery services starting February 1!

The IlliniCloud is contacting districts that submitted their requirement survey papers at the kick-off meeting.  If a requirement survey has not been submitted, you can sign up and submit the required form on the Membership page.

Services will begin February 1.

Disaster Recovery Requirements

• K12 District within Illinois
• Windows or Linux Servers
• A full time technical support person
• Indicate your provider (ICN/other) and connection speed - T1 minimum speed required.
• An existing backup solution.
• Participation and feedback through workgroups.
• IlliniCloud Membership

Disaster Recovery Details

Membership will include participation in the Disaster Recovery trial for those eligible.  Trials will begin February 1st 2011 and end July 1st 2011.

There will be no charge to districts for ‘overages’ of space throughout the trial.

IlliniCloud will be using this trial period to determine the appropriate costs and membership space allotment.

After July 1 2011 there will be a cost per gigabyte for Disaster Recovery services over the membership space allotment.

IlliniCloud will conduct ongoing trials to determine costs for additional services and membership benefits.

IlliniCloud Workgroups are here and open to Illinois school districts!

IlliniCloud will be hosting collaborative teams in the form of Workgroups. We hope that people from all over Illinois with expertise will join us in researching, collaborating and testing all the many technologies that can help make Education better.

Most of the work will take place on the IlliniCloud Workgroup Wiki and on mailing lists. Check out the Wiki for information on how to join and participate in workgroups or become a Workgroup Leader.

We are always looking for more suggestions but as of today, the official Workgroups supported by IlliniCloud are:

Again, check out the IlliniCloud Workgroup Wiki for more information.

With the announcement of the IlliniCloud Workgroups,

I would like to release an Call For Members for the VDI Workgroup.

If you would like to participate head over to the wiki,  create an account on the site, then add your name to the members list on the VDI Workgroup page. You can also join our mailing list.

We are currently accepting any interested K12 people whether or not you have experience in VDI. Now is a great time to learn what Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is and how it can help your district and how it can be implemented into the IlliniCloud.

VDIW already has an informative training lined up open to Workgroup members.

We will have a VDI Mailing list shortly, please check the VDI wiki page for up to date information on the workgroup.

Today was a very exciting day for our effort, we had been nominated as a finalist for best practices in virtualization and cloud computing by the folks at Storage Networking World.

I never dreamed that we would actually win, it was just an honor to be at the industry event with companies like Rackspace,  Google, Fusion-IO, EMC, NetApp, Cisco, HP, etc.

Imagine my surprise when it was announced the Illinicloud had won the award, it was amazing.

This was truly a team effort and would not have been possible without all of the great people that make up the illinicloud team as well as all of the school districts participating that have made us a success at lowering the cost of IT for schools.

The URL below links to the award.  Well done everyone!

-Jason

https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/SNWS2011/19965/?&

In May of 2010 the IlliniCloud held a Webinar to explain in detail the scope of the cloud. The Power Point for that presentation can be found here:

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