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The Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR)
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Get to market faster.
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Reduce your product development costs.
DAIR is a cloud-based, on-demand, advanced research and development environment where Canada’s high-tech entrepreneurs can design, test, prototype, validate and demonstrate new technology apps, products and services.
DAIR uses today’s most advanced cloud-computing technologies to provide you with a competitive advantage – ultra-low-cost testbed facilities – that can speed your time to market and help you get an edge on the competition.
DAIR lets you do what you do best – create innovative applications, products and services – while introducing you to the power of cloud computing at a fraction of the cost of commercial cloud services.
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What sorts of products and projects could benefit from the DAIR Program?
Who will use it?
How it works
Cost
What sorts of products and projects could benefit from the DAIR Program?
DAIR is primarily aimed at products and projects that can leverage a highly scalable network and computing infrastructure. The examples below are not intended to limit in any way what people could use the system for but are used to illustrate how such projects could benefit from using the DAIR Program.
- Social network analysis
- Game based simulations
- Scalable notification systems
- Mobile applications
- Multimedia platforms
- Games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- IT Security systems
Who will use it?
The DAIR service is intended for small-to-medium sized, Canadian tech companies that would otherwise have a difficult time getting their products to market without the resources to complete development and test, particularly product scalability or other powerful aspects of cloud computing.
DAIR is not intended to be a long-term solution; once products are ready for market, they must be moved to a commercial cloud environment.
DAIR users do not need to have experience with cloud computing, but should have personnel who are able to learn and use the technology.
How it Works
Users connect into the system over the internet.
DAIR IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) computing and storage cloud based services allow accepted users to create computers (a virtual machine or VM) on demand with specific CPU, RAM, operating system, and disk specifications, then add their own software. The resulting system can then be saved as an image, and the image launched as a VM on demand. VMs can be instantiated in two geographically separate Canadian locations interconnected by CANARIE’s high-speed network. All of these functions can be performed through APIs, command line interfaces or a web based Dashboard.
Within DAIR, each user’s resources are completely segregated.
Cost
DAIR services are provided for a nominal fee based on granted quota. A summary of the fee, based on the quota (maximum quantity) of virtual machine cores available to the user for 1 year are:
| Tier
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Machine Cores Quota
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Fee for one year of service
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| FREE | 1 to 4 | $0 |
| 1 | Greater than 4 | $100 per core in excess of 4 example: 8 cores would cost (8-4) x 100 = $400 |
For comparison, 4 machine cores run for a year on commercial cloud provider Amazon AWS would cost a minimum of 2,800 USD, and on provider Rackspace a minimum of 2,100 USD.
