Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been enlisted by UK research and education network Janet to provide its 18 million users with access to its cloud offerings.
The deal will provide managed bandwidth for Janet members connecting to the AWS cloud, allowing them to use the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) giant’s pay-as-you-go Direct Connect service.
The arrangement will provide a direct tunnel for Janet users to AWS’ EU West Region data centre in Dublin. This, the organisations claim, will provide a high capacity, low latency and low cost network connection to Amazon's resources.
Janet claimed the initiative is part of its ongoing push to reduce costs and improve the UK research community’s experience of technology.
However, neither Janet nor AWS were able to provide Cloud Pro with any information about the savings their partnership is expected to provide.
John Milner, advisor to Janet and former MIS director at the University of Cambridge, said: “We know that UK research and education institutes are increasingly adopting cloud services, particularly compute and HPC.
“By peering with Amazon Web Services we are supporting UK research institutes’ increasing desire to access cloud technologies and we are complementing our world class fibre network with Amazon Web Services’ leading technologies, to help accelerate scientific research.”
Milner said Janet would continue to focus its investment and partnering relationships on cloud computing, as “with data processing requirements exploding, the adoption of cloud computing will continue to expand within research institutes”.
Janet said a number of its member institutions were already using AWS resources, including the University of Surrey, University College London (UCL), Newcastle University and the University of Edinburgh.
