Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) has teamed up with China’s two largest carriers on a low latency cloud service offering.
IIJ said has teamed up with China Telecom, and China Unicom to offer IIJ GIO CHINA Service, a cloud service that offers a choice of virtual servers or dedicated servers.
IIJ had already been providing the pilot service since September. With the virtual server option, customers can select the CPU, RAM size, disk size, and OS. The equipment for this service is located in the Shanghai data center, and the service provides customer support in Chinese, Japanese, and English. Customers do not have to provide their own equipment, which makes it quick and easy to establish a server environment in China.
The Internet infrastructure for this service is provided by China's two largest telecommunications carriers, China Telecom, and China Unicom, both headquartered in Beijing, providing low-latency communications.
In the past, communications that straddle the networks of both these carriers experienced latency and interruptions (the North-South problem in telecommunications). With this service, IIJ is able to automatically find the fastest connection for the customer. This is the first cloud service in the world to provide this method of connectivity.
IIJ has been operating the IIJ GIO Service in Japan since 2009, and it is currently used by more than 800 corporations. The demand for cloud services in China is also expected to be high.