Ramanujan College Establishes a Pioneering Platform for Open Cloud R&D

Overview

Challenge

• Accelerate India’s cloud adoption by developing open-source cloud reference architectures.

Solution

• Deploy a dynamic private cloud that facilitates R&D for key industry use cases.

Outcome

• Helped Ramanujan College pioneer open cloud solutions for education, digital government and 5G.
• Supported rapid experimentation with one-click open-source cloud technology stacks.
• Delivered scalability and versatility to run multiple high-performance applications per node.
• Freed up $60k per year for research and development by eliminating monthly public cloud costs.

Challenge

Named after one of India’s most famous mathematicians and founded in 1958, Ramanujan College is a constituent college of the University of Delhi. Its ­department of computer science works closely with the Indian government, industry stakeholders and other universities to conduct research and development (R&D) projects. One key focus area is to help develop sovereign cloud platforms that can rival today’s hyperscalers, while securing data within India’s borders.

In the past, much of the R&D work was hosted in the public cloud. However, running performance-intensive applications for 5G communications, blockchain and a learning management system for over 150,000 participants resulted in rising costs.

Vipin Rathi, Assistant Professor at Ramanujan College, Chair of the Hyperledger Telecom SIG and Director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, explains: “When you need to scale up to larger servers with multiple processors in the public cloud, the costs quickly become significant.”

But there was an even bigger issue: “In the public cloud, you don’t have direct control of the infrastructure, which limits your ability to experiment and learn. We realized that to advance the state of cloud innovation in India, we needed to build a cloud technology stack for ourselves.”

Solution

Ramanujan College selected Hitachi Vantara and Silver Leaf Solutions as the lowest tender (L1) in the RFP.  The solution includes a Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G350 array as the foundation for its private cloud, with three Hitachi Advanced Server DS7060 compute nodes to run the cloud software stack and test and production environments for various databases and applications. The DS7060 servers also offered a key technical advantage: each node can scale up to 16 Intel Xeon Platinum processors—ideal for supporting very demanding workloads such as large-scale applications.

Outcome

Today, Ramanujan College has the dynamic infrastructure to support its ground-breaking R&D work and develop compelling cloud reference architectures for government, industry and educational institutions.

In particular, the research is focusing on comparing open-source technologies such as OpenStack, Proxmox, and Xen to find the best virtualization layer and management tools for building its new cloud stack. It also uses Kubernetes for container orchestration, enabling environments to scale automatically as their infrastructure needs change.

Another research area is software-defined networking to support the Indian government’s push to expand 5G internet access into rural areas. Experiments with the open-source Magma Core platform are already running on Ramanujan College’s private cloud and providing valuable data to inform decision-making for the 5G rollout.

Finally, one node of the private cloud is running a production application—the College’s new learning management system. This system provides online courses for more than 150,000 faculty members and research scholars at universities across India. During the pandemic, this system is a lifeline for professional development at a time when traditional face-to-face training was impossible due to India’s strict lockdowns.

Asst. Professor Rathi concludes: “The private cloud infrastructure opens up huge potential for innovation. By building next-generation cloud platforms on open-source software, we can help India lead the world and take control of its own technological future.”