Canada's ultra-high-speed backbone network (Views: 3115)
Fri, 11 Apr 2014
The 2014 Funding Roadshow, a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to pitch their businesses to real investors, has been organized by Fundica with the collaboration of organizations like CANARIE. Established in 1993, CANARIE’s roots are in advanced networking, and CANARIE continues to evolve the national ultra-high-speed backbone network that enables data-intensive, leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world. Today, CANARIE’s programs and services continue to be critical tools for Canadian innovation and research and help to sustain high-paying, specialized jobs in Canada’s knowledge economy.
CANARIE’s participation in the Funding Roadshow stems from its focus on growing Canada’s economy by supporting innovation and research in the ICT sector. Twelve provincial and territorial network partners, together with CANARIE, collectively form Canada’s National Research and Education Network (NREN). This digital infrastructure spans over 23,000 kilometers to form the national backbone network that links one million researchers, scientists and students at over 1,100 Canadian institutions, including universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories. With national coverage and 100 international peer networks in 80 countries, 95% of Canada’s “big science” initiatives and the top 50 Canadian R&D universities rely on CANARIE and its NREN partners.
Of special interest to Canada’s high-tech entrepreneurs is CANARIE’s Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) service. DAIR provides small and medium Canadian enterprises with a free, cloud-computing test bed for ICT projects. In comparison with commercial cloud services, DAIR offers high-performance, no-cost resources, and guarantees that data stays in Canada. Not only does this enable entrepreneurs to speed up their development, testing, and demonstration of a wide range of products, but this free access to cloud-based computational and storage resources gives them a competitive edge in the global market. Dr. Shahzad Khan, President of Gnowit, explains the value that his start-up was able to gain from this service: “We had an excellent experience with the DAIR platform. As we move to the next phase of our business and prepare to enter the US market, we were looking for new resources to deal with the massive amount of information we will be processing – and to prepare we have expanded our usage of DAIR. DAIR has allowed us to perfect our technology and test it at scale – which gives us a huge amount of confidence as we move to launching.”
More than 150 Canadian entrepreneurs currently use the DAIR cloud service, nearly 80% of which are SMEs with less than 9 employees.
For more additional information on how CANARIE is stimulating research, innovation, and growth in Canada and delivering economic, social, and cultural benefits to Canadians, please visit their website at www.canarie.ca.
By Stephen Hanley
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