Founded in Osaka, Japan, MetaDataLab Inc. has grown from a gaming PC business into an innovator in AI development and infrastructure. Alongside the manufacturing and marketing of high-performance PCs for online gaming, the company delivers GPU-powered servers tailored to support the AI development lifecycle, including the development and training of AI models. Deeply embedded in the VTuber (virtual video streamer), otaku (enthusiasts of anime, manga and video game culture) and AI engineering communities, MetaDataLab was founded in 2018.
At-a-Glance
MetaDataLab aims to expand the use of AI across Japan by developing HIMIKO — an AI development platform designed to empower creators. To build and scale HIMIKO effectively, MetaDataLab partnered with cloud provider IDC Frontier to deploy the platform on IDCF Cloud Container and its data center service. Combining Kubernetes with SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Technical Support, IDCF Cloud Container enables MetaDataLab to accelerate and automate key container management tasks — reducing costs and cutting time to market for HIMIKO.
Scaling AI through containerization
MetaDataLab started its AI journey with an ambitious vision: to create a brand-new cloud service for AI, designed specifically for creators in Japan. Named HIMIKO, the new platform aims to help creators bring their ideas to life through cost-effective access to advanced AI capabilities.
The company planned to build HIMIKO on a containerized infrastructure, with the aim of rapidly and efficiently provisioning and managing secure environments for its clients.
Yuji Homma, Representative Director at MetaDataLab Inc., says: “Initially, we considered provisioning separate physical servers for each HIMIKO client. However, we quickly realized that this approach would be suboptimal, as it would result in significant amounts of unused CPU and GPU capacity. Containers help us reduce cost and complexity by securely and efficiently sharing a single pool of compute resources across multiple client environments.”
MetaDataLab aims to stay laser-focused on its AI mission, but recognized that managing its own on-premises infrastructure with vanilla Kubernetes would significantly distract its lean team from core development activities. To avoid this heavy operational burden, MetaDataLab searched for a more effective approach.
“Rancher Prime allows us to orchestrate all our containerized environments from a single point of control, which saves us a great deal of time and effort.”
Why Rancher Prime?
To lay the foundations for HIMIKO, MetaDataLab looked to the cloud. Finding that midsized and hyperscaler cloud providers in Japan placed too many restrictions on power consumption and background processing, the company turned to IDC Frontier.
A SoftBank Group company, IDC Frontier offers IDCF Cloud, one of Japan's largest domestic public clouds, and maintains a significant presence with large-scale data centers across the Tokyo metropolitan area and eastern and western Japan. Through its IDCF Cloud Container offering, IDC Frontier provides a Kubernetes-based platform designed to help organizations like MetaDataLab deploy, scale and manage containerized applications.
“The other data centers and cloud providers we considered were very rigid in their approach, but IDC Frontier was the complete opposite,” says Tomoya Sakou, Executive Officer at MetaDataLab Inc. “With IDCF Cloud Container, we get a flexible and cost-effective platform to deploy our new AI services.”
IDC Frontier uses Kubernetes as the foundational technology for IDCF Cloud Container. To simplify and automate the complexities of managing Kubernetes environments for MetaDataLab and other clients, IDC Frontier relies on Rancher Prime from SUSE.
“Rancher Prime was the ideal fit for our container management requirements,” continues Tomoya Sakou. “Despite our close connections with the engineering community, we have found it very difficult to find local Kubernetes experts in Japan. With Rancher Prime, we can manage multiple containerized environments on the IDCF Cloud Container platform using a simple graphical interface. It’s very straightforward, which means we don’t need specialist skills in-house.”
Impact of Rancher Prime
Higher performance, lower costs
With IDCF Cloud Container and Rancher Prime, MetaDataLab has the perfect ingredients for its new HIMIKO platform. By deploying its systems in IDC Frontier's high capacity data center, the company gained on-demand access to high-performance CPU and GPU resources, supportedby simplified management for its containerized environments with Rancher Prime. By optimizing resource utilization and streamlining operations, MetaDataLab significantly reduced infrastructure costs and minimized the resources required to manage its environments.
“IDC Frontier lets us achieve a hyperscaler level of performance for AI workloads at a significantly lower price point than major cloud providers offered us,” says Yuji Homma. “Crucially, Rancher Prime allows us to orchestrate all our containerized environments from a single point of control, which saves us a great deal of time and effort.”
Cutting time to proficiency
By leveraging SUSE Rancher Prime, MetaDataLab was able to quickly launch and begin operating its HIMIKO platform on IDCF Cloud Container. Streamlining core tasks such as cluster operations, provisioning, monitoring and more, the SUSE solution eliminates the ongoing requirement to recruit and retain Kubernetes experts.
“A couple of training sessions from IDC Frontier was all it took for us to become very confident in using Rancher Prime to manage our containerized environments,” recalls Tomoya Sakou. “The fact that we don’t have to spend several hours a week on repetitive, manual tasks frees us to focus on our goal: making AI more accessible for creators across Japan.”
Accessing on-demand support
For MetaDataLab, IDC Frontier is the first line of support for questions around container management. In turn, IDC Frontier has a close working relationship with SUSE — helping to ensure it can rapidly resolve more complex issues for MetaDataLab.
Mr. Takuya Fujishiro, Container Service SME at IDC Frontier, says: “From pre-development to production, the support we’ve received from SUSE has been excellent.”
What’s next for MetaDataLab?
Through its collaboration with SUSE and IDC Frontier, MetaDataLab is almost ready to launch its new HIMIKO platform, which will go live in the coming months. Building on its partnership with SUSE and IDC Frontier, the company is considering expanding its use of containers and exploring other solutions within the SUSE portfolio.