www.canarie.ca

Digital Accelerator for

Innovation and Research (DAIR)

Mark Wolff Senior Director, Technology Innovation mark.wolff@canarie.ca

May 07/13

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About CANARIE CANARIE designs, delivers, and drives the adoption of digital infrastructure for

Canada’s research and education communities.

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About CANARIE

CANARIE keeps Canada at the forefront of digital research and

innovation, fundamental to a vibrant digital economy

• Advanced networking: CANARIE operates the national ultra-high-

speed backbone network

– enables data-intensive, leading-edge research and big science across

Canada and around the world.

– one million researchers, scientists and students at over 1,100 Canadian

institutions, including universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals,

and government laboratories have access to the CANARIE Network.

• Supports research: leads development of research software tools that

enable researchers to more quickly and easily access research data,

tools, and peers.

• Supports Canada’s high-tech entrepreneurs: offers cloud-computing

services to accelerate product development and gain a competitive

edge in the marketplace

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CANARIE Mandate

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• Network Operations: • Continue to operate the CANARIE Network as essential research

infrastructure;

• Technology Innovation: • Develop, demonstrate, and implement next-generation technologies to

advance the CANARIE Network as a leading-edge research network;

and

• Private Sector Innovation: • Leverage the CANARIE Network to assist firms operating in Canada,

and Canadian universities, to advance innovation and

commercialization of products and services to bolster Canada’s

technology innovation capabilities.

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About DAIR

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DAIR Pilot

• March 2011 through September 2012

• Pilot Objectives

– CANARIE

• Prove technology meets the user’s needs

• Demonstrate user demand for the service

– Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

• Speed time to market for commercialization

– Overall

• Stimulate the high-tech sector by removing a competitive barrier for

small and medium sized high tech companies

• Development and test only, no commercial use, although customer

trials are ok

– Not competing with private sector cloud providers using public funds

– 1 year limit to services to encourage movement to private cloud providers

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DAIR Full Program

• November 2012 through March 2015

Desired Outcomes

• Increase SME ICT research and development performed within Canada. • Increase the development and use of high value technologies such as

cloud and mobile computing for SMEs. • Speed time to market for SMEs.

Definition

• DAIR is an integrated virtual environment that leverages the CANARIE

network to develop and test new ICT and other digital technologies. It

combines such digital infrastructure as advanced networking, and cloud

computing and storage to create an environment for develop and test of

innovative ICT applications, protocols and services, perform at-scale

experimentation for deployment, and facilitate a faster time to market.

University Provincial

networks

Small/

Medium

Enterprise

Small/

Medium

Enterprise

Compute

Node

Sherbrooke

Compute

Node

Alberta

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University

Internet

www.canarie.ca

Why SMEs Want DAIR (in their words)

1. Need compute resources of any kind, no cloud experience

“It should allow us to have access to a high speed server and connection to do

our project development and testing.”

2. Moving to the cloud, or expanding use of the cloud

“While the core of the application generator is developed and has been used

to generate applications on dedicated servers, work remains to test the

resulting applications when running in the cloud.”

3. Better use of their funding

“The DAIR Program will allow access to much needed cloud infrastructure to

promptly start development of our pilot service. The time is reduced because

we currently do not have the capital budget to buy hardware, or the operating

budget to procure a service that meets our requirements.”

4. All of the above

“We are hoping that DAIR provides a means by which to explore delivering

this service using virtual resources in which whose underlying physical

implementation we don't need to invest any thought, time, energy and

ultimately, money.”

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How DAIR transforms Canadian SMEs

1. Need compute resources of any kind, no cloud experience

– SMEs have modified their business models to incorporate private or public

cloud after experiencing DAIR and the benefits of IaaS technology

firsthand.

2. Moving to the cloud, or expanding use of the cloud

– SMEs are able to implement their cloud technology transformation plans

within an environment of infrastructure cost certainty.

3. Better use of their funding

– SMEs are assisted in making use of transformational technology by

leveraging the investment in the CANARIE network.

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Attracting SMEs to DAIR

• Difficult

– Small percentage of SMEs arrive through simple (social) advertising

– requires constant outreaches to create flow of SMEs to program

• Outreaches through SME incubators, government agencies, introduction

to cloud presentations, but all take effort and time

– Take-up by SMEs for cloud services not strong (DAIR or otherwise)

• Not enough resources to create product, services and also develop for

cloud deployment.

• SMEs must put in 5x the retail value of free computing in their own

labour to use the system.

• Very good results for an outreach would be 5 companies applying when

speaking to 25 companies at an incubator.

– Cost of SME acquisition through some channels can equal commercial

value of cloud services provided to an SME

– DAIR post pilot scaled to serve a larger number of SMEs, but workflows are

more self-serve, much less guidance and direct advice provided

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0

10

20

30

40

50

# o

f U

se

rs

Date

DAIR - Number of Active Users

Outreach =

response to slow submissions

DAIR Pilot SME acquisition

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Revised onboarding strategy

• Full private sector style business model, implementation program

around attracting SMEs

• Embedding DAIR within incubators as part of services provided

– SMEs need:

• funding, business acumen, market access (Incubators)

• access to technology (DAIR and Incubators)

• Tighter coupling, continual awareness with major government SME

development programs

• Cloud technology training sessions in addition to introduction to cloud

outreaches

• Attraction rate improved

– 7 months to hit 40 users with DAIR pilot

– 3 months to hit 40 users with full DAIR program (albeit with benefit of pilot

preceding the program)

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Cost Recovery (1)

• Examining cost recovery models as part of the full DAIR program

• Pilot was free to SMEs

– Did not advertise specific capabilities (cores, disk space), asked SMEs to

submit what they wanted for resources without guidance

• This permitted us to get true demand versus echo of our capabilities

– In practice capped resources to a quota based on requests and supply

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DAIR pilot best metric was compute, not

storage

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Perc

en

tag

e o

f Q

uo

ta

Date

DAIR - Percent Disk, CPU Quota Used over time

% Disk Quota

% CPU Quota

30GB disk space

provided per core of

quota

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Cost Recovery (2)

• Full DAIR program has small cost component

– Free level of resources (4 cores, 8GB ram, 80GB disk) for one year

– Additional cores, ram, disk $100

– Average Pilot user (12 cores) would pay approx 10% of private sector fees

• Expected most users to would select 6 cores (4 cores free + $200)

– Most users are not currently paying, but if paying they buy many cores

– SMEs are proving to be extremely cost adverse

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39

Purchased Cores

Free Cores

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Leveraging CANARIE for SMEs

• Using a small slice of the CANARIE infrastructure assists many SMEs

with almost zero impact on CANARIE’s other services

Load created

by VMs of 5 SMEs

as a comparison

Load created

by single VM

of 1 researcher

• However sophisticated resource management is required to support

large numbers of SMEs and (big data) researchers on the same cloud

infrastructure

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Currently in development on DAIR

includes:

• Monitor the internet

• Track spending

• Manage programs and services

• Block spam

• Find television content

• Online 3D virtual environments

• Location enabled SaaS platform

• Mobile security monitoring

• Warehouse management

• Network traffic monitoring

• Industrial information exchange

• Social gaming for health

• Web server anomaly detection

• Mobile applications hub

• Call centre Saas

• Text mining system

• Online scholarship applications

• Insurance data mining

• Cancer detection through

genome analysis

• Investment and income analysis

• Media monitoring and analysis

• Trusted access to digital

systems

• Automating cloud compute

activities

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