Hitachi Vantara implements online learning management system for Ramanujan College

Hitachi Vantara has developed the dynamic data infrastructure for Ramanujan College (of the University of Delhi) that runs an online learning management system to train 150,000 faculty members and research scholars at universities across India. The college’s new private cloud infrastructure also supports its ground-breaking R&D work and develops compelling cloud reference architectures for government, industry, and educational institutions.

Previously, much of the R&D work by Ramanujan College 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. This phenomenon is being witnessed in enterprises across industries where companies are deploying more cloud services resulting in ungoverned on-demand consumption, and unexpected operational costs eating up promised cost savings. In fact, IDC predicts that in India, by 2024, 30% of organizations using cloud services will establish a dedicated FinOps function to automate policy-driven observability and optimization of cloud resources to maximize value.

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. The private cloud infrastructure opens huge potential for innovation. By partnering with Hitachi Vantara to build next-generation cloud platforms on open-source software, we can help India lead the world and take control of its own technological future.”

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.

One of the research areas of the college includes 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 for the 5G rollout. By adopting the private cloud approach, Ramanujan College pioneered open cloud solutions for education, digital government and 5G. This infrastructure development also freed up $60,000 per year for the college to allocate for research and development by eliminating monthly public cloud costs.

Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Hitachi Vantara, commented, “Education is crucial to India’s rapid development and we are delighted by the positive outcomes brought by our solutions. Now Ramanujan College has agile and flexible infrastructure to support its ground-breaking R&D work and develop compelling cloud reference architectures for government, industry, and educational institutions. Their new learning management system provides online courses for more than 150,000 faculty members and research scholars at universities across India.”