2010 Best Practices Competition IT & Informatics HPC

B. INTRODUCTION/background/objectives
Amylin IT set out to move to a flexible technology model that would allow access to world-class IT
capabilities, without having to operate each of those capabilities. First, the team spent several
months preparing detailed cost analysis for every service they provide. This “cost by service”
model included the labor, licensing, maintenance, hardware, data center cost and even power
usage for each service and application allowed the team to do more accurate comparisons of
costs between delivering services internally or externally.
The result was a list of IT services or applications provided by Amylin IT, each of which would be
assessed to determine whether the same service could be provided at lower cost through utility
services. Besides cost, other factors were also considered, including security, performance,
architectural appropriateness for the cloud, and vendor capability. Importantly, the team actively
looked for opportunities where SaaS and the Cloud would work, rather than enumerating all the
reasons why cloud doesn’t work.
Amylin built-out a “toolkit” of Cloud and SaaS offerings that their IT staff could make use of to
enable flexible IT. For Infrastructure as a service (IAAS), they chose Amazon Web Service
(AWS) and vertical offerings built on AWS. For Platform as a Service (PaaS), they use
Force.com. For cloud storage, they started a relationship with Nirvanix. And finally they began a
deep investigation of Software as a Service (SaaS) capabilities to meet their application needs.
In each case, internal IT teams would begin pilot projects, have personal “sandboxes”, and get to
understand these capabilities on a technical level. In the case of Amazon, Force.com, and
Nirvanix, initial skepticism turned into a positive response, as the capabilities of these tools were
understood. Getting tools in the hands of technical people was key to gaining their understanding
an buy-in.
C. RESULTS (highlight major R&D/IT tools deployed; innovative uses of technology).
As Amylin rolled out their cloud initiatives, they first focused on Amazon EC2 to host a limited
number of application use cases. Amazon EC2 will continue to grow as a hosting platform for
Amylin, and additional migrations are planned for this year and 2011.
Amylin has a number of internal legacy applications, often without the internal resources to
manage or upgrade them. As initial pilot applications were successful, the team is now planning
to move legacy applications to Force.com. The component reusability and rich platform led
Amylin developers to determine they could be more productive in such an environment.
The third focus was storage and disaster recovery capabilities. Rather then building out an inhouse
system, Amylin called upon Nirvanix, a cloud storage partner. Amylin server images and
data is now stored in the Nirvanix cloud, meeting compliance requirements and providing disaster
recovery and backup capability for Amylin’s data.
Finally, Amylin invested significant time understanding the wide range of SaaS offerings
available. Frequently, they discovered that SaaS offerings were more feature-rich and easier to
use than internally hosted applications. Currently, Amylin utilized over a half a dozen SaaS
applications, and migrations to several more are in progress. These include Workday, Microsoft
Hosted Exchange, LiveOffice, and Saba.
Amylin used the following tools (cloud services) to meet their business needs:
Nirvanix: Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) for enterprise cloud storage. The project involved
moving critical validated server images that are used for all business and manufacturing applications
and drugs simulation process such as Blast, C‐Path and other genomics simulations. Since these are