India's NIC builds IaaS cloud on Eucalyptus

SANTA BARBARA, USA: India's National Informatics Centre (NIC), a division of the Department of Information Technology, has selected and deployed the Eucalyptus Systems' open source software as the foundation for its cloud project, which calls for the execution of cloud-based e-governance projects on a broad scale.

Eucalyptus Systems is a provider of on-premise cloud computing platform.

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NIC is providing the network backbone and a wide range of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) services to government organizations throughout India, including a nationwide communication network for decentralized planning, improvement in government services and wider transparency of national and local government institutions.

As part of the initiative, the NIC is delivering IT services and infrastructure to remote districts and villages through an architecture built on Eucalyptus.

"India's NIC is making the seemingly impossible a reality for India's most remote districts and villages, which may only have electricity for a few hours a day," said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO. "Through the power of cloud computing, IT workers in districts and villages can now get a server for development and hosting to ensure that critical government programs continue. Access to readily-available and scalable compute power is also enabling a range of new government services that weren't possible before. We are extremely proud to participate in such an important initiative."

India's NIC started this initiative in 2009 with a single cloud in Hyderabad, and NIC now has ten Eucalyptus clouds throughout the country.

In a paper titled, "Eucalyptus cloud to remotely provision e-governance applications"*, Sreerama Prabhu Chivukula and Rajasekhar Krovvidi from the Department of Information and Communication Technology National Informatics Centre, explained:

"Remote rural areas are constrained by serious limitations such as lack of reliable power supply, etc., which are essential for setting up advanced IT infrastructure such as Servers, Storage, etc. Therefore, Cloud Computing comprising of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is well suited to provide such IT infrastructure in remote rural areas. Ensuring high reliability, scalability, high availability of citizen centric e-Governance services is very important. Cloud computing makes it possible to accomplish this task cost effectively."