01 August 2016
Janet, the high-speed network for researchers and academics, will see some of its capacity tripled over the next three years.
The upgrade will mean core network capacity across some paths will be increased from 200G to 600G.
Janet is run by Jisc, the UK’s digital solutions provider for the HE, FE and skills sectors.
It says that the extended capacity will, for example, allow universities across the world to share petabytes of research data every day.
“To put this into context, a single petabyte is enough to store the DNA of the entire US population and clone them twice,” states Jisc.
It adds that as well as greater capacity, the upgraded network will offer organisations more flexibility to ensure that their present and future needs are met.
“It will make video-based teaching, group working and online interactions between students and lecturers more effective and seamless,” says Jisc. “The added capacity will also support a larger number of technology options, allowing students and staff to log in anywhere at any time and connect their own devices to the network.”
Other benefits of include support for new business models such as the surge in data intensive research, analytics, media-rich teaching, the growth of satellite campuses, and the increase in cross-organisational and industry collaborations.
The network upgrade has been made possible by funding Jisc secured from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and the funding councils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Jisc says the investment follows continued growth in data traffic across the Janet network. It says data traffic has consistently doubled every two and a half years since 2010, with the demand being driven by a considerable rise in the use of cloud-based services.
Tim Kidd, executive director of Jisc technologies, says: “An increasing culture of change and innovation within higher and further education organisations, along with a surge in cross-organisational collaboration and access to open educational resources, have all contributed to the increased data traffic across the Janet network.”
Kidd believes the upgrade will be instrumental in keeping UK research competitive on a global scale, and enable high end collaborations across a wide range of projects that support areas like medical research.
He adds that the improvement will mean researchers can have access to facilities like high performance computing which will speed up data heavy activities and carry out high-quality collaborations in real time.
“They will also feel more confident when bidding for grants as they know they have the right infrastructure in place to support projects,” says Kidd.