New Brunswick’s New Advanced Network Fully Operational

After years of planning, installation, and configuration, New Brunswick’s next generation research and innovation network is completed and fully operational. The NB network also represents a new partnership that will serve the region for many years to come. Building on professional relationships and common interests, the NB/PEI Educational Computing Network (ECN) is partnering with the National Research Council-Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT), and the English and French community college systems in NB (NBCC/CCNB), in the new sustainable, economical, and long-term network covering all of  NB and PEI. The new network  features high-speed, high-bandwidth fibre cable installed between Moncton, Saint John, and Fredericton, and utilizes leased services to complete the northern loop of NB, thus connecting pretty well all post-secondary locations to the main NB/national research network.

Nova Scotia’s Digital Leaders Summit

Kathryn Anthonisen
Vice President, Marketing
CANARIE

Contributor: Kathryn Anthonisen, Vice President, Marketing at CANARIE

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I had an energizing day in Halifax last week, joining over 50 other digital innovators, visionaries, and practitioners at the Digital Leaders Summit II. The discussions were lively, the ideas flowed freely, and most everyone in the room had an opportunity to offer their ideas about how to build a strong Digital Nova Scotia. One thing participants did agree on was the need for a strong, single voice to represent the sector in Nova Scotia and beyond.

Following the afternoon session, we all enjoyed a fabulous dinner, with guest speakers Premier Darrell Dexter and Bill Hutchinson, Chair of the iCanada initiative.

You can read more about Digital Nova Scotia and the role of CANARIE’s and ACORN-NS in supporting it here.

But why just read about it when you can see it all in action? Watch it here!

BCNET & HPCS Community to Connect, Compute and Collaborate in Vancouver, May 1-3, 2012

BCNET: British Columbia’s Shared IT Services Organization for Research, Higher Ed and Regional CANARIE Partner

How often would 500 of Canada’s higher education computing and IT experts come together in a forum to discuss the latest innovations and developments in technology? We are making it happen on May 1st, as we kick off our 11th annual BCNET Conference, bringing together a national community of experts in high-performance computing, high-profile members of the Canadian research community, IT professionals in higher education, high-tech and telecommunications industry professionals and Canadian and American advanced research network organizations.

This year we are joining forces with Compute Canada and WestGrid to host a national technology conference for research and higher education at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver. The joint event will deliver a rich array of content, offer experiences of professional development and plenty of networking opportunities.

Our Conference venue and hotel vacancies are filling up fast, so don’t miss your chance to interact with Canada’s technology experts! Register today on our Conference page and begin planning which sessions you want to attend!

Content-Rich, Interactive Sessions

Member-focused and member-driven, our conference program serves up the hottest IT topics that are designed to be interactive to peak your learning experience. Our community of IT working groups and committees have devised a content-rich schedule, covering a host of topics from privacy, security, social media and mobility to cloud computing and desktop collaboration tools.

Furthermore, we plan on highlighting how BCNET’s expanded mandate of shared IT services for higher education and research assists B.C’s research universities and institutes to reduce costs and support their strategic objectives. Our high-speed, high-capacity advanced network is the digital highway that transmits data and services amongst campuses. If you’re interested in acquiring a better understanding of how a shared IT services platform can impact an institution‘s mission and vision, this is one session you definitely don’t want to miss.

HPC & Data Management

Our HPCS partners will share the latest tools, techniques and advancements in computational research and data management. These sessions will range from case studies to panel discussions that aim to explore a variety of high-performance computing issues such as the sustainability of data centres, the security measures and privacy policies around big data, and the role of big data in the medical field.

Keynotes On Our Future

Hear from Leonard Brody, a business and technology visionary, described as “a controversial leader of the new world order.” Brody is a highly respected entrepreneur, venture capitalist, bestselling author and a two-time Emmy nominated media visionary who has been through one of the largest internet IPOs in history.

Our second keynote, Dr. Michael Wesch, is a cultural anthropologist known as “The Explainer” exploring the effects of new media on society and culture.

Rounding out our trifecta of keynote speakers is John Towns, the NCSA Director of the Distributed Cyber infrastructure Program Office, who will be illustrating the importance of advanced computing and data resources by presenting a number of computational science and engineering research projects.

Come to Vancouver to Learn, Share and Connect

Whether it’s from the real-life campus case studies or the hands-on pre-conference workshops, everyone attending the 2012 BCNET & HPCS Conference will gain valuable insight on the research and higher education community’s innovative IT and computing solutions.

The national scope of our event will allow you to network with not just professional colleagues but also industry experts from all over the country through speaking tracks and industry showcases.

Needless to say, our concept of a jointly hosted Conference between BCNET and HPCS stays true to the idea of partnership and collaboration, a spirit that is inevitably necessary to advance research and higher education into the future.

Open Source Culture

Many members in the IT community are long-standing supporters of the idea of open source, including Cybera. But it really became evident that this movement had gone mainstream when it is was recently featured at a TEDx talk. For Edmonton’s inaugural TEDx Salon Series, held February 8, the main topic for discussion was the benefit of open source and open source culture, and how it has already become an important function in our everyday online activities.

As Steve Fisher, one of the four presenters at the TEDx event, pointed out: “a lot of people don’t even know that they’re using [open source software].”  For example, if you’ve ever used WordPress to build a blog, or used Drupal to create and manage your business website, guess what: those are open-sourced content management systems (CMS).

The benefits of open source for a community can be as macro or as micro as you like. Fisher summed it up quite nicely when he said that open source, “at its heart, is about making things better.” It’s altruistically motivated, meaning that it is a good thing simply for the sake of being a good thing.

A good example of this is one of the open source projects that Cybera currently manages: the Water and Environmental Hub (WEHUB). This online platform connects water and environmental data gathered from open source websites or participating geo-based organizations, and makes it available in a format that users can access, share, mash-up and model. The goal of WEHUB is to not only be a one-stop shop for any water-related information, but to also make it easy for applications to be built on this data using a unified output service (API). This will enable a wide variety of useful, educational and fun applications to be created and shared with the public.

Currently, the WEHUB has both an example Apple and Android app available for free download.

Open government is a similar idea that has the same goals in mind, and benefits to the public, as an open source project. Here in Alberta, Edmonton has proved to be a shining example of this initiative. Developers and interested citizens in the city are given access to information such as neighbourhoods boundaries, garbage collection schedules, and recreation facility locations and amenities, all live-streamed via the Internet. The city also offers the added bonus of a Google Document to keep track of what data sets may become available in the near future, and when the existing data was last updated. Not many other cities have the same open source culture in government.

This information can be also used to develop applications that would be of further use to citizens. The popular “there’s an app for that” tag-line from Apple ads carries some serious weight in Edmonton; it’s likely that there is an app for most public information needs, to which Edmontonians can thank their open government.

Open source software is moving our world forward, and having the open source culture allows both source code and minds to remain open. To summarize using Fisher’s words: “I do [this] because I believe in it, I don’t do it necessarily because I get paid (although I do appreciate that). I do it because I think it’s an altruistic thing to do. I love that the world around me is improving because of some of the things that I’m doing.”

A Canadian Tech Star Shares His Thoughts

Contributor: Kathryn Anthonisen, CANARIE Inc.

This rainy February weekend, CANARIE is in Vancouver at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. This is the 178th meeting of the organization, and the first time it’s been held in Canada for the past 30 years. It is a Big Deal: more than 5,000 attendees have gathered to share knowledge and learn what’s new in science.

Among the many illustrious speakers was Mike Lazaridis, former RIM co-CEO. It’s not every day that you are privy to the thoughts of one of Canada’s premier technology leaders, so the seats at the AAAS plenary lecture by Mike Lazaridis filled up fast.

Speaking on “The Power of Ideas,” Lazaridis gave the crowd a bit of history about himself and about how big ideas that changed history often were not thought of as big at the time. Giving the audience a glimpse of his history, he shared that, not surprisingly, he loved electronics and building things as a child. In high school, he was taking both advanced science and math courses and shop class, and a particularly inspiring teacher enabled him to see the connections between them.

Challenged by this special teacher, his electronics shop class enabled him to see the concrete expression of the math and science he was learning about. Later on, when he was a student at the University of Waterloo, another great teacher offered elective evening seminars on quantum mechanics which, as Mike described it, often ended late into the evening as students engaged in rigorous and challenging discussions.

These defining experiences sharpened his curiosity and shaped his passions in ways that ultimately drove him to create Canada’s premier technology company and lead the smartphone revolution worldwide.

But another anecdote was particularly resonant for the audience. Mike described how, at the turn of the century, urban planners were focused on the key issue of the day: what to do with all the horse manure. Horses were key transportation infrastructure, and the results of their efforts posed serious health problems.

He juxtaposed this with Einstein’s work at the time, which was clearly not focused on the problem of the day (manure) but rather on the nature of space and time. His discoveries enable much of the foundations for our modern world, and the technologies we rely on, from MRIs to nuclear power.

Lazaridis’ point was that we cannot be blinded by the urgency of our current problems, but should try to foster research that may not be related to current issues but that can lead to breakthrough discoveries that will change the world in ways we cannot imagine.

His advice to the scientists assembled was to go in the direction their curiosity leads them and pursue their ideas with the utmost passion. He suggested that science is the first successful global democracy, as it is based on allegiance to reason and curiosity, and bound by a system of peer review.

Going forward, providing our children with the best education possible, and fostering the magic that happens between a student and a teacher, will build thinkers who are bold, who are determined, and who will follow their passion with courage and determination.

Inspiring words from an inspiring Canadian leader.

From the future of broadband networks to the deployment of IPv6, the 21st annual RISQ colloquium is a success!

THE FRENCH VERSION WILL FOLLOW

The 21^st annual RISQ symposium RISQ 2011: à l’écoute de vos besoins (RISQ 2011: Listening to Your Needs) kicked off on October 25^th with 164 attendees present, surpassing attendance numbers of the last three conferences. 

“The branding and theme of this year’s conference speaks volumes about the importance we place on our members,” said Michel Vanier, General Manager of RISQ.

One of RISQ’s goals has always been to maintain a tight-knit relationship with its members, which was emphasized in this year’s conference title, À l’écoute de vos besoins (Listening to Your Needs).

“This past year, we have put significant effort into this objective with the introduction of services that better address the needs and situation of RISQ members, along with direct measures which allowed our members to better use our network and manage their traffic more efficiently,” added Nancy Rancourt, director of Member Services and Operations.

Listening to Our Members

This year’s conference programming was planned around concerns members shared with RISQ throughout 2010 and 2011. Speakers delivered excellent presentations on “the future of broadband networks with the deployment of IPv6 and Web security” that were applicable to the daily lives of the participants. The results speak for themselves. Overall, 96.2% of 55 survey respondents said they were “very satisfied” with the conference and 98.1% “appreciated the quality of presentations”. Presentations from CANARIE (98% satisfaction) and RISQ (92.5%) were particularly popular, as were two workshops on the integration of IPv6 presented by Cisco (88.1%) and RISQ (87%). While these four presentations were the conference favourites, attendees were highly satisfied with the rest of the presentations as well.

What Does the Future Hold?

In the throes of developing a business plan for 2012-2015, RISQ is taking the time to consider its next steps, as evidenced by Michel Vanier’s presentation, which was peppered with open-ended questions. The multitude of opportunities and possibilities RISQ boasts in member services and network development suggests that its future is bright and that the organization is at a crossroads, not a dead end.

Technology for the Environment

At the previous colloquium, the RISQ team decided to cut down on paper as much as possible and maximize its use of available technology. This initiative had a positive impact on 94.3% of survey respondents. Apart from a few posters outside conference rooms, not a single printout was made or handed out to participants. Instead, attendees could view the entire conference schedule on their smartphones through a Quick Response (QR) code or directly from the conference website on giant computer tablets set up near the meeting rooms (imagine iPads with 32- to 40-inch screens!). To top it off, even the satisfaction survey was eco-friendly, as it was sent in an electronic format instead of on paper.

All in all, the 2011 RISQ colloquium was high-tech yet environmentally friendly!

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De l’avenir des réseaux à large bande à l’intégration d’IPv6
La 21^e édition du colloque du RISQ est un succès !

C’est devant quelque 164 participants qu’a été lancée la 21^e édition du colloque annuel du RISQ, le 25 octobre dernier, sous le thème RISQ 2011 : à l’écoute de vos besoins. Un record de participation comparativement à 2007, 2008 et 2009.

« La signature et le thème de la 21^e édition en disent long sur l’importance que nous accordons à nos membres », mentionne d’emblée Michel Vanier, directeur général du RISQ.

Depuis toujours, le RISQ met tout en œuvre pour maintenir une relation la plus étroite possible avec ses membres. L’équipe du RISQ a été à l’écoute des besoins de ses membres et le principal événement annuel en a été le reflet.  « Dans la dernière année, cet objectif a pris tout son sens avec la mise en place de services qui se rapprochent encore davantage des besoins et de la réalité des membres du RISQ, et cela, sans compter les réalisations sur le terrain qui ont permis à nos membres une utilisation plus performante du réseau et une gestion plus aisée de leur trafic », renchérit Nancy Rancourt, directrice Service aux membres et Exploitation.

À l’écoute de nos membres

Tout au long de l’année 2010-2011, les membres nous ont fait part de leurs préoccupations. Le programme 2011 a été bâti en fonction de ces préoccupations. De l’avenir des réseaux à large bande, en passant par l’intégration d’IPv6 et la sécurité Web, les conférenciers ont livré des prestations d’une grande qualité, tout en restant collés sur le quotidien des participants. Les résultats parlent d’eux-mêmes : dans l’ensemble, 96,2 % des 55 répondants au sondage nous ont indiqué être très satisfaits du déroulement général du colloque et 98,1 % d’entre eux ont apprécié la qualité des présentations. Les présentations de CANARIE
(98 %) et du RISQ (92,5 %) ont été particulièrement prisées, de même que les deux ateliers sur l’intégration d’IPv6 présentés par Cisco  (88,1 %) et le RISQ  (87 %). Bien que ces quatre présentations aient été les grandes favorites, le niveau de satisfaction à l’égard des autres présentations reste très élevé.

Que nous réserve le futur?

Michel Vanier a habillé sa présentation de signes d’interrogation; une ponctuation qui demande généralement une réponse ou qui invite à la réflexion. En pleine préparation du plan d’affaires 2012-2015, le RISQ est, en effet, en phase de réflexion. Il est sage de s’arrêter à l’occasion pour s’interroger sur l’itinéraire que nous empruntons. Le RISQ est à un carrefour, pas dans un cul-de-sac ! Une multitude d’opportunités et de possibilités s’offrent  au RISQ en matière de services aux membres et de développement du réseau. Le présent est garant du futur et le futur sera prometteur !

La technologie au service de l’environnement

Lors du dernier colloque, l’équipe du RISQ s’était mise comme défi d’éliminer le plus de « papier » possible et de maximiser l’utilisation de la technologie pour promouvoir son programme. Cette initiative a eu un impact positif auprès de 94,3 % des répondants. Outre les quelques affiches du programme disposées à l’entrée des salles de conférence, aucun document imprimé n’a été remis aux participants. Ces derniers pouvaient consulter l’ensemble du programme à partir de leur téléphone intelligent, grâce à un code QR, ou directement sur le site Internet à partir d’une tablette électronique géante qui se trouvait à proximité des salles de conférence. Imaginez votre iPhone en format 32 ou 40 pouces; c’est sur ces énormes tablettes que les participants pouvaient explorer le programme de la journée ! En ce qui a trait au sondage de satisfaction, on s’est également tournés vers la technologie en utilisant un logiciel de sondage électronique.

L’édition 2011 était technologique, mais écolo !

Centralizing Science?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

Years ago many universities had their own research telescopes and small accelerators. But as the demands, as well as the costs, of science increased, researchers quickly realized they had to consolidate their resources and build instruments that served the needs of hundreds or thousands of researchers around the globe. Virtually of all today’s big science instruments such as telescopes, particle accelerators, and synchrotrons are multi-country collaborations.

Research computing may be headed in the same direction.

The next generation of super-computers and research cloud infrastructure required for things like climate modeling, weather forecasting, or epidemiological studies, which will require massive amounts of energy to operate. The energy costs alone may compel international partnership to deploy and build such infrastructure on the same scale of global collaboration as we have seen for telescopes and particle accelerators.

Big Science facilities need to think about emissions.

More importantly with the growing threat of climate change it is critical that such facilities not be major sources of CO2 emissions in their own right. Some examples:

• The new climate modeling super computer in Exeter in the UK
• The recently constructed NCAR data center in Wyoming.

We are already seeing early signs of such research-computing collaborations. Examples:

• The investigation by CERN to relocate its data center to Nordic countries,
• The examination, by universities in the Boston area to relocate their computing facilities to a small municipal hydro-electric facility 90 miles west of Boston.

Potential cost savings

Global collaboration will also significantly save individual universities millions of dollars in electrical costs as research computing currently represents 15-30% of the electricity consumption at many universities. The energy savings alone could possibly pay for this next generation of research computing and still leave additional money to support critical research.

Obviously high speed optical networks and open lightpath exchanges will be critical to such a reality. But it is just as important that energy and environmental savings not be transferred to the higher costs in the network and so new low-carbon network architectures are needed as well.

Do you see this as the future of research computing?

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About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.

Browserless Federated SignOn Techniques Contrasted: Shibboleth/ECP and ABFAB/Moonshot

One of the key puzzle pieces for federated ID is how to deal with sign on outside the browser. When you peek behind the curtain of the web  you will see tools like SSH and SCP and jobs running on machines pushing content everywhere and people signing in to accomplish tasks ill suited for the web.  In other areas you’ll see people wanting to use their ID to sign into a cloud application on their smartphone (like mail) or a specialized application on their desktop (think Google Earth).

We want to mask some of the complexity of using a Federated ID behind the curtain as much as we can and only reveal what is REALLY needed to get the job done.  In this posting we’ll be exploring two candidate technologies to do this.

WARNING! Some technical content ahead!    Ok, this posting  may be a bit of a technical read, but I’ve tried to keep the acronyms to a minimum.  I am also assuming that you know a bit about Single Sign On techniques and have slightly more than a passing familiarity with Shibboleth and SAML.

So put on your gear for something beyond a shallow dive, but not the full deep dive it could be, I don’t think you’ll get the bends but if the comments drag us into that territory don’t blame me

The Contenders

We are going to take a look at two approaches to non web sign on; Shibboleth with the ECP (Enhanced Client or Proxy) plugin and the IETF’s ABFAB (Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web) that was formally known as Project Moonshot.  Both techniques have their merits and drawbacks.  I hope that  by offering this comparison I can help identify some of the things to think about and hear back from others about how on target (or not) I am with the analysis.

Non Web Federated ID Use Cases

Use cases take the shape of many things:

• IMAP mail access for your smartphone
• plain SSH/SFTP for secure shell access
• A rich or ‘fat’ client that leverages local graphic and compute capabilities.
• Insert your clever outside the browser use of id/passwords.

Use Case: Mail in the Cloud

This is/was slide 51 from the Live@edu slide deck from one of their TechNet in late 2010 (credit: Microsoft).  It illustrates the use of the Microsoft Federation Gateway communicating with Shib ECP for authentication.  The end users offers their userid scoped with their domain (e.g. joe@my-university.ca) and the ‘hint’ of the domain allows the gateway component to direct the authentication request to the appropriate ECP enabled interface.  This hint is not part of the SAML protocol at all, but a function of how the cloud service provider will route the request it receives to the right provider. The password DOES transit the cloud  so it is up to the Identity Provider to have sufficient assurance from the vendor that the right steps are taken (e.g. IMAPS, safe transit within the cloud etc).

The reply by the Shibboleth IdP via a reverse SOAP call (PAOS, yes soap written in reverse) and carries a special identifier for the Live@EDU service: PersistentID.  This value is special to the cloud mail service as it links the person to their mailbox.  My understanding from IdPs participating in this space is that the PersistentID is generated upon account creation in the institutions person registry.It is just an attribute passed over the wire instead of a dynamically computed attribute like eduPersonTargetedID. It is also BASE32 encoded which eduPersonTargetID is not.

Use Case: Federation Aware Rich Desktop Client

Screenshots of some of the OpenJump documentation that uses SAML. OpenJump deals with the discovery issue by having you as the user enter the Metadata URL into the actual application.  Good? Bad?  Well, you judge, but if you say bad, help us understand how you would do it to minimize the user managed discovery aspect? Hand waves don’t cut it, please be specific…

Key Considerations – Tipping Point Concerns

You can argue that we need to look at many facets of the conversation, but I contend that there exists tipping point ones you need to pay attention to and are the key drivers — these are ‘the who’ and ‘the what’. Once you wrestle those to the ground, the rest will follow when going through a comparison on what to use in your situation.

The Who

‘The who’ is your audience of users and the important question to ask about them is ‘How diverse a group are they?’  If you can influence/control the diversity as in keep them all originating from the same bucket, then this may work to your advantage — more on this in a moment.  If you can’t and are talking about a diverse set of users originating from many identity providers then this is important too.  In either case, there will always be an identity provider of last resort to capture the corner cases and our goal is to minimize this set as much as possible.

The What

‘The what’ is what are you trying to deliver or improve?  Are you trying to allow a smartphone or tablet access to their email or are you trying to allow SSH/SFTP access to unix boxen under your control?  Are you trying to do both?  Your endpoints you want to serve are going to influence your selection.

Comparing and Contrasting

The table below highlights some of the comparison points to be considered:

	Shibboleth+ECP	Moonshot/ABFAB
Password Treatment	Userid/Password pair seen & transits outside classic Shibboleth infrastructure boundaries	Userid/Password seen @ endpoint & transits through RADIUS infrastructure via SSL tunnel
Home Institution Discovery	Somehow preconfigured either via user or by static configuration in proxy & proxy under an infrastructure providers control	Userid contains hint to institution so it is present in credential and implicitly discoverable on usage (e.g. <id>@realm.ca)
Attribute Exchange	Exchanged via SAML2, aggregated via standard Shibboleth fashion (DB/LDAP/static values etc)	Exposed via GSS API, delivered via RADIUS pack/unpack technique, aggregated from many potential sources
‘Breadth’ of accounts	ECP configuration or end user intervention drives breadth of coverage	If RADIUS uses eduroam, entire set of  federation accounts are available
Environment Used in	Mobile devices, IMAP clients, very targeted and controlled infrastructures. Unix machines with a preconfigured Id Provider.	Unix shell environments, rich clients, anywhere that the GSS-API exists.

There are more, but to me these are the big ones.  I’m sure there are readers out there that have thoughts, so please share them and I’ll see if they fit in.

Conclusions…for now

If you were looking for me to declare one method over the other, I’m sorry to disappoint — the answer is of course it depends.  It will depend on how you respond to  ’the who’ and ‘the what’ and then feed that into the calculation of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the approach you choose.

Some of these things are going to be intangibles too, like ‘are you staffed with the right skills?’ and ‘how many calls to the helpdesk can you avoid?’.  I think anyone going through the decision process on deploying one or the other or even both needs to think about the big picture topics.

I accept that this comparison is incomplete but I believe it to be complete enough for the purpose of kick starting a dialog about it. I look forward to the comments and emails to see how well my position holds…

R&E Network Model of the Future?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

There is a growing momentum among the major Research & Education (R&E) networks around the world to move to Open Lightpath Exchanges (OLEs where, as Cees de Laat explains, hybrid networks meet to:

• exchange traffic
• facilitate international interconnections
• minimize quantity of colo, equipment and cards required
• minimize call blocking probability at optical exchange points

OLEs will fundamentally change the future of R&E networking. At the spring 2011 Internet2 meeting and in follow-up discussion at the Terena meeting, a joint statement was drafted representing the views of many of the attendees on why OLEs are so critical to the future of R&E networking and represent significant opportunity for network innovation.

OLEs Allow Choice

OLEs will allow individual institutions, even researchers to directly peer with each other with no policy constraints and eliminate or minimize the need for a traditional “network.” Point-to-point links will still be required

Virtual Infrastructure: The diagram above shows how virtual infrastructures are created. They are assembled by creating « slices » of the physical substrates, which are then aggregated into a working virtual infrastructure from which services can be delivered. The physical infrastructure consists mainly of servers, disc arrays and network elements such as switches and routers, whereas the virtual infrastructure consists of virtual machines, virtual storage, virtual routers and virtual switches. (Image courtesy: GreenStar Network)

between exchange points and these will need to be provisioned through a variety of means. But now it is the choice of those who connect to the OLE, whether it is an institution, researcher or virtual organization, to compose their own network topology.

As some of you may remember this was one of the original concepts of the CA*net 3/CA*net 4 (CANARIE) architecture and drove the design of Universal Commerce Language and Protocol (UCLP). I am pleased to see that Internet2’s Open Science, Scholarship and Services Exchange (OS3E) (http://www.internet2.edu/network/ose/) is a similar strategy in this regard.

The driver for these developments, of course, is the demand of big science. But just as importantly OLEs will enable a new wave in network innovation with such new concepts as “software defined networks,” “Just in time networking,” “network as a service,” “pay as you go networking,” etc. OLE architecture is also a fundamental underpinning for zero carbon networks like the GreenStar Network which is based on a hub (OLE) and spoke model.

Financial Challenges

No question OLEs may cause serious financial challenges for many regional networks and NRENs, as institutions and researchers need only pay for direct costs of interconnecting at an OLE as opposed to a bundled membership package.

But I still believe there will be a critical role for R&E networks of all types. In the future the major focus of their revenue I believe will not be in provisioning pipes or IP networks, but in new network services such as national 5G wireless initiatives, content peering and distribution, outsourcing campus IT and managing science DMZ, energy CO2 reduction services in relocating data centers to remote locations, supporting continent-wide or global cyber-infrastructure or e-Infrastructure.

What are the implications of the OLE concept for Canadian R&E networks?

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About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.

Disturb. Dislocate. Disorder. Disrupt?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

Some argue that the role of Research & Education (R&E) networks should only be as a low-cost Internet service provider to the R&E community.

Others counter that R&E networks should focus on providing services to support e-Science and perhaps even integrate with other e-Infrastructure providers such as High-Performance Computing (HPC) and grid.

And yet still others argue that R&E networks should work closely with industry by providing testbeds to develop and/or improve industry products and enable commercialization of university R&D.

In my opinion R&E networks can play far more important role, first in supporting e-Science, but also in helping industry and creating a knowledge society by being an innovative “disrupter.” This is where R&E networks have been hugely successful in the past:

• first in the build out of the original Internet,
• next in deployment of low-cost user-owned fibre networks,
• and more recently in areas of new architecture for low-carbon Internet networks and global authentication schemes.

These disruptive developments were first intended, in many cases, to support the needs of science, but also had a beneficial effect of creating new network business models and enabling knowledge transformation of society as a whole.

I am pleased to see that we are now on the verge of another disruptive change with respect to R&E networks.

Once again, while these network transformations are first being driven by the needs of eScience the network architectures are starting already to have a beneficial effect on broadband architectures in general. A good example, of course, is the unique facilitation role that Internet2 is playing in the rollout of national broadband through its partnership in UCAN. Other examples include the deployment of community transit exchange points by BCNET and peering points by KAREN in New Zealand.

Do you see R&E networks as disruptive technologies?

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About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.