The Attended Cloud Housing (ACH) service is an offering that allows users to buy hardware that will be operated by the LRZ and will be made available exclusively for these customers via the LRZ Compute Cloud.

Target audience

LRZ's ACH service targets users that …

• … want or need to have exclusive access to cloud resources,
• … want or need to use resources whenever they need and do not want to or cannot cope with the situation that the requested resources are used by other users and therefore their VMs cannot be started,
• … want or need to invest a certain amount of money for compute resources but do not want to or are note able to run the hardware on their own (e.g. when writing a funding proposal).

It is important to understand that we will operate the hardware as part of the LRZ Compute Cloud infrastructure. This means that once in a while we need to take down the cloud for maintenance reasons. There is no guarantee regarding the availability of our Cloud hardware. But we will do our best.
If you need high available resources please have a look at our Server-Hosting offering.

Keep an eye on our announcements to stay up to date.

It is important to understand that this system is not suitable if you need fast local storage (e.g. for machine learning workloads)! 

Offering

The LRZ will obtain hardware for the customer that will be integrated in our Cloud infrastructure. It will be operated similarly to all other Compute Cloud nodes and will be made available to the user like the normal servers. ACH customers enjoy the following advantages:

1. Exclusive access to their resources
   Because of the fact that the hardware can only be used by the customer, the hardware will always be available even if the public part of the Compute Cloud is fully used with no free resources left.
2. Scale out to the LRZ Compute Cloud
   The customer can not only use the ACH resources but can easily run VMs also on the "public" part of the LRZ Compute Cloud in case more resources are needed.
3. Hardware will be managed by LRZ
   In contrast to an on-premise solution the hardware is located the LRZ cloud infrastructure and will be maintained by the cloud administrators. We will take care of the servers' operating system updates and configuration, firmware updates and so on. In the case of a hardware failure we will take care of the necessary steps.
4. Fast connectivity (to other LRZ services)
   Another benefit of using LRZ Compute Cloud resources is the quick interconnect with other LRZ services such as the Data Science Storage or the Backup and Archive service. We use 100 GbE Ethernet technology for the network interconnect using the LRZ's Leaf and Spine networking infrastructure.

To ensure a seamless integration into the existing cloud infrastructure we only offer a certain set of hardware that is not freely customisable by the customer. To be able to manage a large amount of servers with limited personnel we make use of heavily automated deployment and management scripts that allow us to quickly integrate new hardware to the cloud. However, these scripts only work if the servers do not differ in hardware and configuration. Therefore the user is limited to specific server types and configurations.

Usage of your server(s)

We will provide you with access to your ACH servers using our normal cloud web frontend. The only difference from creating a VM in the "public" part of the LRZ Compute Cloud is that you need to use a different flavor.

We will create flavors named <LRZ project ID>.large, ... for you. Only users of your LRZ project can have access to these flavors. If you choose on of these, your VM will be executed on your personal server(s). If you choose one of the publicly available flavors lrz.*, your VM will be executed on the public cloud nodes.

Next steps

If you are are interested in the ACH offering you should contact us if you have any questions, for pricing information, or for a firm offering. A personal meeting (or a video or phone conference nowadays) is always the best way to get an impression what exactly do you need and what we can offer.

The process for ACH is as follows:

1. Contact us to discuss what hardware you need and what we need to provide you with.
2. We will ask our supplier for the hardware configuration you need. This may take some time.
3. Once received we will provide you with a firm offering.
4. After you accept this offering we will order the servers for you. This may take some time.
5. When the hardware arrives at LRZ we will integrate it in the Cloud environment, set it up and provide you with access to the hardware.