In educational and sci-tech institutions, schools and departments purchase their own servers, storage devices, and other hardware devices and apply the information silo architecture. Resources are stored in great numbers of isolated islands and are very difficult to be shared. This causes low overall resource utilization, high O&M costs, and high energy consumption.

In educational and sci-tech institutions, the overall IT labor force is limited. Deeper down into each school or sci-tech department, their IT labor force shrinks even further. Therefore, their O&M and operational capabilities are very limited. This puts growing pressure on IT staff and very often causes work overloads.

In the traditional server hosting models, deploying new applications requires frequent access to the server room, routing, and network configurations. This process takes a long period of time. In addition, most new applications are not configured with unified mechanisms such as storage, backup, reliability mechanisms. Neither are the hardware devices in the server room deployed in a unified way. Thus the network topology becomes ever complex and the routing of new systems becomes ever difficult.

The emergence of cloud computing, big data, and AI technologies requires colleges and universities to build many environments for students to do experiment and research. However, traditional server room laboratory resources can provide only one testing and development environment at a time and the switch between each environment is slow. This cannot satisfy new curricular practical training requirements. In addition, teachers are unable to batch manage and initialize large numbers of practical training environments.