JANET recruits suppliers for new cloud infrastructure framework

JANET, the UK's government-funded technology and education network, has announced its first cloud infrastructure framework, incorporating innovation from eight selected suppliers.

The framework is wide ranging

The framework is wide ranging, offering services from colocation through to cloud infrastructure, and aims to lighten the burden of procurement and compliance with EU regulations for institutions. In conjunction with the recently formed JANET Brokerage service, the organisation claims it will drive the use of cloud computing across the UK, as so then as saving both time and money.

"We've managed to establish a framework, which is agile enough for everyone on the JANET network, in a remarkably short space of time," said Dan Perry, head of strategic business at JANET. "Institutions are queuing up to use it, with our support, to help them move to cloud computing and data centres."

Education Cloud

Non-profit IT service provider Eduserv already runs an Education Cloud, giving universities and colleges in the UK access to storage and processing power on demand. The Education Cloud features compute and storage offerings pursuant to this agreement both VMware vCloud and OpenStack, supports virtual machines running Windows and Linux, and has direct connectivity to the JANET backbone.

"Given our long history of helping the education sector make better use of IT, we jumped at the chance to join the new JANET framework," said Julian Mitchell, education manager at Eduserv. "Institutions will be able to benefit from our infrastructure and cloud expertise and make use of our UK-based data centre, which is directly connected to the JANET network via duel 10Gb links."

Business process services provider Liberata said that education and innovation institutions are now seeing energy-efficient, off-campus data centres and services as a way to reduce both risk and cost. In the meantime, ICT provider Logicalis said that JANET would benefit from its experience in helping higher and furthermore education institutions adopt new ICT delivery and consumption models.

How universities

"How universities and furthermore education colleges provide computing and storage services hereafter are going to be heavily dependent on the emergence of quality cloud services," said Tom Kelly, managing director of ICT provider Logicalis UK.