Logicalis has announced that its high-density data centre (HDDC) and range of Made to Measure cloud services are now natively connected into JANET, the network dedicated to the needs of education and research in the UK. Logicalis' connection to the unique high bandwidth academic network will provide a range of data centre and cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service, application hosting for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) servicing the education community, through to high density hosting of virtualisation and supercomputing environments.

The JANET network connects UK universities, Further Education (FE) colleges, Research Councils, specialist colleges and Adult and Community Learning providers, providing a shared network backbone and high performance computing facilities at a national and international level.

Chris Gabriel, director of solutions and marketing for Logicalis UK, commented; "Logicalis has been a trusted and innovative partner of the UK higher and further education sector for many years, and bringing our data centre and cloud services to the JANET user community further demonstrates what can be achieved when the public and private sector work together. As well as the services we have made available today, we also want to reach out across the sector and to other service providers, such as ISVs, to maximise what we have built for the benefit of the entire education community."

Tim Kidd, operations director for JANET(UK), commented; "The connection into Logicalis' high density data centre and cloud services will provide education institutions with a range of services dedicated to high performance ICT environments and, through cloud, enable these to scale on-demand. It is of benefit to the sector to have partners bring innovative new services and solutions onto JANET, and we are pleased to have Logicalis' data centre and cloud services available to the entire community."

Logicalis' HDDC opened in June 2010, along with the launch of its cloud services, as part of a GBP10million investment programme. A Tier 3+ facility with the capability to support 4 to 32kw racks anywhere within the data centre, it provides a Made to Measure home for high performance virtual infrastructures and high power supercomputing environments. Services available to the community include Infrastructure as a Service (compute, storage, and network), on-demand disaster recovery, Cloud Hosting, and Cooperative Cloud - enabling users to dual-locate ICT infrastructure between their own site and Logicalis' facility.

Simon Daykin, CTO at Logicalis, adds: "Many service providers peer with the JANET network, but we have gone much further by natively extending JANET into our data centre and cloud environment. This gives JANET's users and our existing education customers the ability to extend their campus into our environment and benefit from highly virtualised cloud services and a high-density infrastructure, without the constraints of the Internet or the capital costs incurred through building a shared private network.

"JANET is one of the longest-running examples of successful shared network services in the public sector, to which Logicalis is committed to bringing its expertise and investment in shared and hosted ICT services, helping facilitate and contribute to its future collaboration and innovation."

Logicalis is piloting a number of solutions and services into the education sector, including hosting of open source virtual learning environments such as Moodle, as well as shared and hybrid cloud infrastructure services which enable institutions to move part of their internal infrastructure to a hosting provider.

Logicalis will be opening its doors to education ICT and business professionals on February 23rd at an ICT in Education Innovation Day to explore how cloud computing and data centre services may change the thinking behind infrastructure and services deployment.