CENIC, in partnership with Internet2 NET+ Services, will extend its unique purchasing program for Amazon Web Services, to faculty, staff, and students at participating research and education institutions nationwide by Fall 2012

ARLINGTON, Va., Apr 24 — Internet2, the world's most advanced networking consortium, today announced that together with CENIC, California's advanced networking consortium, they will now offer a new purchasing program for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make it easier for research and education community institutions to take advantage of the AWS cloud. This new program will provide a community-friendly self-service portal created and managed by AWS solution provider, Datapipe; discounts on eligible AWS services; and expanded payment options that include invoicing and grant-friendly pre-payment services, as well as traditional credit card payment services.

"This new approach to facilitating ease of access while aggregating usage of Amazon Web Services within our R&E community represents the next of many steps we plan to take in streamlining access and lowering costs for use of these increasingly important cloud compute and storage resources," said Louis Fox, president and CEO of CENIC. "CENIC is delighted to be an Internet2 NET+ provider in collaboration with Datapipe and AWS to introduce this new approach to our K-20 R&E community."

"Amazon Web Services has been a valuable tool for us at California State University Channel Islands. We've replaced instructional and research servers for faculty, created online environments for students, extended our on-campus storage facilities, and even brought up an experimental voice switch. AWS is flexible, versatile, fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. We're thrilled that the new program between Internet2, CENIC, and Amazon will make it even easier for us to procure and use these essential services," stated A. Michael Berman, vice president for Technology & Communication California State University Channel Islands.

"Datapipe's Managed Cloud for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a one-of-a-kind managed services offering that provides the flexibility, scalability, and power of the AWS cloud platform," noted Robb Allen, CEO of Datapipe. "This CENIC-Internet2 program demonstrates how Datapipe delivers innovative new solutions for cloud governance and enablement."

All Amazon Web Services will be available, with the following services eligible for the discount program:

-- Application Services: -- Amazon CloudSearch

-- Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)

-- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

-- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

-- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

-- Compute: -- Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2)

-- Amazon elastic MapReduce

-- Auto Scaling

-- Elastic Load Balancing

-- Content Delivery: -- Amazon CloudFront

-- Database: -- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

-- Amazon DynamoDB

-- Amazon SimpleDB

-- Amazon ElastiCache

-- Deployment & Management: -- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

-- Amazon CloudWatch

-- AWS Elastic Beanstalk

-- Networking: -- Amazon Route 53

-- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

-- AWS Direct Connect

-- Storage: -- Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3)

-- Amazon Elastic Book Store (EBS)

-- AWS Import/Export

-- AWS Storage Gateway

-- Support: -- AWS Premium Support

-- Web Traffic: -- Alexa Web Information Service

-- Alexa Top Sites

Research and education institutions interested in participating in this purchasing program for Amazon Web Services will be able to sign up through CENIC.

This initiative signals the next step in CENIC's relationship with AWS, which began with the establishment of a trial 10-Gigabit peering between CENIC and AWS in November of 2009. This trial gave CENIC the opportunity to study the benefits that a high-speed connection to AWS brought to CENIC's members.

About CENIC

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students.

CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

About Internet2

Internet2 is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation's leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. For more information, visit www.internet2.edu.

About Datapipe Managed Hosting

Datapipe offers a single provider solution for managing and securing mission-critical IT services, including cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, colocation and data centers. Datapipe delivers those services from the world's most influential technical and financial markets including New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai. For more information about Datapipe visit www.datapipe.com or call 888-749-5821.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services – now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

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Source: CENIC