This document discusses CANARIE's Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) program. It provides the following information: - DAIR is a cloud computing resource offered by CANARIE to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) accelerate product development through access to computing infrastructure. - The initial DAIR pilot from 2011-2012 proved successful in meeting SME needs, and the full DAIR program from 2012-2015 aimed to further support SME research and development. - While attracting SMEs to use DAIR services has been challenging, strategies like partnering with incubators helped improve adoption rates over time. DAIR provides resources to SMEs at a much lower

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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.

8. University Provincial
networks
Small/
Medium
Enterprise
Small/
Medium
Enterprise
Compute
Node
Sherbrooke
Compute
Node
Alberta
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University
Internet

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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
#ofUsers
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%
PercentageofQuota
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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