In recent years, as university digital campus modernization has continued to advance, a growing range of applications and services have been deployed, covering areas such as twin campuses, teaching supervision, classroom inspection, venue management, IoT management, hybrid learning, and information services.
These increasingly diverse and demanding workloads place higher requirements on IT infrastructure. Universities need high-performance infrastructure with flexible resource allocation capabilities to ensure stable operation under high-concurrency data traffic, such as online course registration and teaching activities. At the same time, they require a more agile, reliable, and scalable infrastructure foundation that can support the rapid deployment of new applications and services as future needs continue to grow.
Based on SmartX ECP, SmartX provides higher education institutions with the full-stack capabilities needed to build modern IT infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking and security, data protection, and management. Many universities have adopted SmartX ECP to support key digital campus and academic administration systems, while also building research IT infrastructure to accelerate research innovation and further advance digital campus modernization.
China University of Geosciences (Wuhan Future City Campus)
China University of Geosciences is a national key university directly under the Ministry of Education. It is among the universities selected for the national 211 Project, Double First-Class initiative, and 985 Project Innovation Platform for Advantageous Disciplines.
Its Wuhan Future City Campus planned to build a Digital Campus Teaching Supervision and Classroom Inspection Platform, covering multiple business systems such as a digital twin platform, teaching supervision and classroom inspection system, venue management system, IoT control system, central control system, hybrid teaching system, and information publishing system.
To control costs, the university hoped to reuse existing servers running for less than two years. However, these servers differed in brand, model, and configuration. After a simple deployment test, SmartX ECP successfully reused all existing servers, delivered strong performance in tests for the above business systems, and met the university’s expectations in fault tolerance.
Ultimately, the university deployed a SmartX ECP cluster on reused multi-brand servers to support the systems related to its Digital Campus Teaching Supervision and Classroom Inspection Platform in the Wuhan Campus. The cluster has been running stably for three years, helping the university reduce costs and improve efficiency while modernizing its digital campus.
Fudan University – CFFF Computing Platform
Fudan University adopted a domestic-CPU-based SmartX ECP cluster to provide efficient data transfer support for CFFF (Computing for the Future at Fudan), Fudan University’s dedicated intelligent computing platform.
CFFF is the largest cloud-based intelligent computing platform for research among Chinese universities. It includes “Qie Wen No. 1,” an AI-for-Science computing cluster for multidisciplinary innovation, and “Jin Si No. 1,” a dedicated high-performance computing cluster for advanced research in computational science. Together, they deliver 28 PFlop/s of computing power.
The “Qie Wen No. 1” platform required high-speed data storage and high-speed cross-city data transfer. As a result, RDMA support became a key criterion in Fudan University’s infrastructure selection.
In tests of the SmartX ECP under a 100Gb storage network configuration, traffic bandwidth was about 6GB without RDMA enabled. After RDMA was enabled, bandwidth increased to 19GB, a 216.67% improvement.
Based on the test results, Fudan University ultimately deployed a SmartX ECP cluster with AMD CPUs, an “NVMe cache + all-NVMe flash” storage configuration, and “25GbE service network + 100GbE storage network + RDMA” networking. This provides high-performance, low-latency support for data transfer on “Qie Wen No. 1,” enabling efficient data exchange between campuses in different cities and the intelligent computing cluster.
Suzhou Institute of Technology
Suzhou Institute of Technology, formerly Changshu Institute of Technology, is a provincial public full-time undergraduate institution jointly supported by Jiangsu Province and Suzhou Municipality. To respond to national requirements for information technology application innovation (ITAI), the university planned to upgrade its IT infrastructure with domestic alternatives.
After evaluating multiple options, the university introduced SmartX ECP and built an ITAI hyperconverged cluster based on Hygon-CPU servers. The cluster supports core business systems, including a smart classroom interaction system, campus cloud drive, water and electricity management platform, teaching assignment review system, and low-carbon energy monitoring platform. These business systems were smoothly migrated from KVM and VMware virtualization to the SmartX ECP cluster.
The university also introduced Distributed Firewall of Everoute (SmartX ECP’s networking and security component) to provide fine-grained isolation for east-west traffic between VMs, improve platform security, and build a virtualization environment that meets classified cybersecurity protection compliance requirements.
The project was fully certified on domestic-chip servers, enabling self-controlled IT infrastructure. Its pure software architecture also supports minute-level expansion, accelerating the rollout of smart education services. The entire system has been running stably for nearly three years and now supports teaching, management, and research scenarios across the university.
A Polytechnic Higher Vocational College
As a leading higher vocational college with a strong focus on skills-based education, the college is committed to building first-class program clusters and has developed multiple national-level backbone majors as well as provincial-level branded and high-level program clusters.
As the college continued to grow, its smart campus platform placed higher requirements on the underlying infrastructure. The existing traditional three-tier architecture required significant investment in a new data center and suffered from low resource utilization and complex operations, hindering smart campus development. Against this backdrop, the college planned to build a cloud-based infrastructure and get prepared for the future ITAI transformation.
After technical evaluation, the college introduced SmartX ECP to support its smart campus systems. This eliminated the need for independent storage and enabled unified management of compute and storage resources. The college could also choose its own server hardware, effectively lowering initial investment. The hyperconverged architecture supports pay-as-needed investment and online expansion, fully meeting the platform’s need for dynamic capacity expansion as services grow.
At the same time, the college used ELF virtualization, aligned with domestic technology standards, to fully replace VMware virtualization, reducing licensing costs and completing a domestic technology stack transition across the infrastructure management platform, server virtualization, and storage.
With its innovative architecture and wide compatibility with domestic technology stacks, SmartX ECP provided the college with an efficient, flexible infrastructure upgrade path aligned with its transition requirements. The college completed its move from a traditional architecture to a cloud-based architecture while reserving room for future growth.
Based on existing hyperconverged capabilities, the college plans to introduce SMTX Backup and DR to build a cross-campus disaster recovery solution, increasing business system availability.
More Resources
High-Speed Data Exchange for Fudan CFFF
Supporting High-Impact Research: SmartX ECP Powers Scientific Platform Development at SIMM, CAS
