EU hunts cloud providers for Europe-wide megadeal

Cloud service providers sought to supply more than 8,000 educational institutes across Europe

Cloud providers are being hunted by the EU to supply more than 8,000 educational establishments as part of a pan-European mega-framework.

GEANT is a pan-European research and education network which connects more than 40 million learners studying at more than 8,000 universities and educational institutes across the continent.

The EU, which funds the projects, claims GEANT has long been considered the "most advanced research network in the world" and says it has a record of 99.999 per cent availability.

In a Prior Information Notice (PIN) published over the weekend, the EU said it wants to "future-proof" the network to 2020, prompting it to start the hunt for a range of cloud service providers (CSPs) across the region.

The "IaaS cloud services delivery to the European research and education community through GEANT" framework aims to enable its users to access a "transparent and balanced set of community and public cloud services".

"The key objectives of this PIN are to acquire and develop significant market knowledge in respect of relevant services and use this knowledge to support the community through the production of a directory of cloud providers for infrastructure as a service ‘IaaS' (the GEANT cloud catalogue)," the PIN read.

"[We aim to] inform the market about the potential market within the sector and provide a mechanism for early engagement with the community [and] to begin paving the way to a balanced portfolio of cloud service providers trading on common terms."