[CAnet - news] Research networks versus production networks

[At the recent UKERNA annual meeting there were a couple of interesting
presentations by Andrew Kerl and Robin Tasker of University College London
and Rutherford labs respectively.  Because of the advances in the UK
e-science program UK institutions are at the forefront of facing some new
network challenges of meeting the network needs of high end researchers.
Often these requirements conflict with the everyday production needs of
campus networks.  Both institutions decided to implement a separate
dedicated research network, separate from their production campus network,
to connect up their high end users directly to lightpaths over the UKlight
optical network.  This allowed the institutions to provide the bandwidth and
services needed by their high end users without impacting the traffic on the
production network. Of course, there are many issues related to security,
fire wall bypass, back door routing, etc with these type of infrastructures
- but the presentations by Tasker and Kerl were very interesting in how they
dealt with these problems.

The future evolution of campus networks may be evolving the same way campus
computing did over the past 30 years.  In the early days universities would
often have a single large time share computer to meet all the university
computing needs with dumb terminals scattered all over the campus. Over
time, high end departments such as physics, engineering, computer science,
etc acquired their own computing systems independent of the campus main
frame time share computer. This gave them the freedom and flexibility to
have computing resources dedicated to their specific application. The
examples cited by UCL and Rutherford may be an early sign of a similar trend
in networking.  Rather than having one common campus network with a central
IT network administration, we may see several parallel campus research
networks each dedicated to the needs of a specific department or high end
users. These networks would have their own independent wide area connections
to discipline specific IP networks using optical infrastructure like UKlight
for applications such as grids, virtual collaborations, etc-- BSA]

For more information please see the Ukerna network conference web site:

http://www.ja.net/conferences/networkshop/Networkshop33/prog.html


Session 3c - Managing Research Networking Requirements - Panel Session


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