CTC Launches Development of Native Cloud Application for Automatic Infrastructure Control

ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Satoshi Kikuchi, President & CEO; hereinafter "CTC") will develop an application that automatically expands and deletes servers, storage, networks and other IT resources according to the process. For the current fiscal year, CTC has adopted OpenStack^*1 open source cloud infrastructure as a platform on which the application will operate. This project will be subsidized under the FY2013 Subsidization Scheme for Industrial Technology Commercialization and Development Projects operated by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and its achievements will be made public in open source format to help stimulate cloud development in Japan.

In recent years, companies have been utilizing a range of IT services, including private and public cloud services, and service providers are required not only to ensure stability of their services but also to provide more flexible services including compatibility with the systems owned by corporate clients and with cloud services offered by other operators, as well as high load support. Under these circumstances, a software-based system that flexibly controls the entire cloud is called an Cloud OS. It is now being used as a platform of cloud services.

In this project, CTC will endeavor to develop native cloud applications, which are for the purpose of controlling different resources in the cloud environment according to the number and types of data processes that business systems handle. It controls IT sources not based on the status of load on the CPU, memory, etc. but on the volume and method of processing the application handles. This paves the way for more effective securing of infrastructure according to the application's operation.
As a starter, CTC will adopt the OpenStack Cloud OS as an operating environment and embark on development of native cloud applications that will perform batch processing with the system load considerably fluctuating depending on the data volume and method of computation. For batch processing, CTC will develop a high-speed data processing application that collaborates with Asakusa Framework™^*2, from NAUTILUS Technologies, Inc., which is a development framework for batch applications for Hadoop, increasingly used among corporate users as an internal data integration platform.
CTC will push ahead with service collaboration between cloud services and data centers on the IT infrastructure platform for software-powered efficient management under the concept of software development infrastructure (SDI). Defining native cloud applications as best suited to the SDI environment, CTC will conduct development efforts including application to its own cloud services.