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Hokkaido University Builds Japan’s Largest Academic Cloud Using Cloud.com
Leading open source cloud computing platform selected as the foundation for enabling university researchers to have unlimited access to academic IT resources
Cloud.com has announced that Hokkaido University in Japan is using Cloud.com’s flagship technology, CloudStack, to power the university’s public cloud offering. To establish the academic cloud in Hokkaido University, Hitachi is providing total system integration with supercomputing, blade server and storage platforms that enable all university researchers in Japan with access to academic computing and technology resources.
The rapid growth of the cloud computing market is creating new opportunities and models to improve IT utilization. Hokkaido University has implemented CloudStack on top of the Citrix XenServer hypervisor and is enabling an integrated cloud solution for provisioning, management and operation of IT resources from a unified portal. In addition to creating a more agile, on-demand environment for consuming IT resources, this new cloud offering reduces operational cost and power consumption per server by up to 20 percent, making for a greener IT department.“The university was looking for a cost-effective new way for researchers to create, store, and exchange academic contents and to develop experimental systems for their research projects. By choosing to move our existing infrastructure to the cloud, information is now readily available for our researchers,” said Dr. Masaharu Munetomo, associate professor in the Information Initiative Center at Hokkaido University. “Through the collaboration with Hitachi, Ltd., we chose CloudStack because of its open source structure and innovation, in addition to its ability to deliver the capability to build and deploy this compute cloud, the first of its kind in Japan.
“We are pleased to work with Hokkaido University and help them build Japan’s largest academic cloud. Cloud.com is focused on making the task of building a cloud simple, thus enabling IT organizations to free up human resources,” said Sheng Liang, founder and CEO of Cloud.com. “Working with the Japan-based university reaffirms our commitment to the Asia-Pacific region, and the traction we have seen in the Japanese market in the last six months has been astounding. We look forward to continuing to expand in this region.”
By establishing the academic cloud system, Hitachi, Ltd. is providing total system integration with leading-edge technologies such as HITACHI SR16000, high performance and high reliability supercomputing, Hitachi Compute Blade 2000, blade server, and Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family, state of the art storage platform, as well as maintenance and delivery of the Cloud.com CloudStack to Hokkaido University. Hitachi expertise in the cloud computing market, coupled with the company’s key relationships with cloud innovators, make it the best partner to help implement the CloudStack at Hokkaido University. Furthermore, because of its intimate knowledge of IT requirements across the Japanese market, Hitachi enables Hokkaido University to reduce costs while accelerating the deployment of its academic cloud.
Recognizing that organizations currently face a daunting task when trying to build their own IaaS cloud environment, Cloud.com provides customers with the fastest path to owning their own cloud by providing the latest and the most advanced software platform for building highly scalable, highly reliable cloud computing environments. Cloud.com currently enables over 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment that have been built on its market-leading open source cloud computing solution including KT, Nokia Research Center, Tata Communications, GreenQloud and Logicworks. Cloud.com technologies can be deployed on-premise or as hosted cloud services.
