JANET

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This article is about the computer network JANET. For other uses, see Janet (disambiguation).

JANET is a private British government-funded computer network dedicated to education and research. All further- and higher-education organisations are connected to JANET, as are all the Research Councils; the majority of these sites are connected via 20 metropolitan area networks across the UK. The network also carries traffic between schools within the UK, although many of the schools' networks maintain their own general Internet connectivity. The name was originally a contraction of Joint Academic NETwork but it is now known as JANET in its own right.

It is linked to other European and worldwide NRENs through GEANT, has a private connection to its equivalent CERNET in China and peers extensively with other ISPs at Internet Exchange Points in the UK. Any other networks are reached via transit services from commercial ISPs.

JANET is operated by JANET(UK), formerly known as UKERNA (the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association), who are also responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. It is funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Origins

JANET developed out of a number of local and research networks dating back to the 1970s. By 1980, a number of national computer facilities (ULCC London, UMRCC Manchester, Rutherford Laboratory serving the Science and Engineering Research Council community), each with their own star network had developed. There were also regional networks centered on Bath, Edinburgh and Newcastle, where groups of third level institutions had pooled resources to provide better computing facilities than could be afforded individually. These networks were each based on one manufacturer, were mutually incompatible, and overlapping. In the early 80s a standardisation and interconnect effort started, hosted on an expansion of the pioneering SERCnet X.25 research network. The system first went live in April 1983, hosting about 50 sites with line speeds of 9.6 kbit/s. In the mid-80s the backbone was upgraded to a 2 Mbit/s backbone with 64 kbit/s access links, and a further upgrade in the early 1990s sped the backbone to 8 Mbit/s and the access links to 2 Mbit/s, making JANET the fastest X.25 network in the world.

The JANET effort resulted in the standardisation known as the Coloured Book protocols, which provided the first complete X.25 standard. (One effect of the adoption of Coloured Book was that JANET hostnames were backwards compared to the Internet standard, e.g. UK.AC.HATFIELD.INFSC1 instead of infsc1.hatfield.ac.uk.) There had been some talk of moving JANET to OSI protocols in the 1990s, but changes in the networking world meant this never happened.

History

In January 1991 the JANET IP Service (JIPS) was set up as a pilot project to host IP traffic on the existing network. Within ten months the IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic, and the IP support became official in November. Today JANET is primarily a high-speed IP network.

In order to address speed concerns, several hardware upgrades have been incorporated into the JANET system. In 1989 SuperJANET was proposed, to re-host JANET on a fibre optic network. Work started in late 1992, and by late 1993 the first 14 sites had migrated to the new 34 Mbit/s ATM system. SuperJANET also moved solely to IP.

In 1995 SuperJANET2 started, adding 155 Mbit/s ATM backbones and a 10 Mbit/s SMDS network encompassing some of the original JANET nodes. JANET's mandate now included running metropolitan area networks centered on these sites.

SuperJANET3 created new 155 Mbit/s ATM nodes to fully connect all of the major sites at London, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds, with 34 Mbit/s links to smaller sites around the country.

In March 2001 SuperJANET4 was launched. The key challenges for SuperJANET4 were the need to increase network capacity and to strengthen the design and management of JANET to allow it to meet a similar increase in the size of its userbase.

SuperJANET4 saw the implementation of a 2.5 Gbit/s core backbone from which connections to regional network points of presence were made at speeds ranging between 155 Mbit/s to 2.5 Gbit/s depending upon the size of the regional network. In 2002 the core SuperJANET4 backbone was upgraded to 10 Gbit/s.

SuperJANET4 also saw an increase in the userbase of JANET with the inclusion of the Further Education Community and the use of the SuperJANET4 backbone to interconnect schools' networks. The core point of presence (Backbone) sites in SuperJANET4 were Edinburgh, Glasgow, Warrington, Reading, Bristol, Portsmouth, London and Leeds.

In October 2006 SuperJANET5 was launched after £29 million of investment. It provides a 10Gbit/s backbone, with an upgrade path to 40GBit/s over the next few years. SuperJANET5 is a hybrid network offering, providing both a high speed IP transit service and private bandwidth channel services provisioned over a dedicated fibre network. It is designed not only to fully accommodate the requirements of the traditional JANET user base - all research institutes, universities and further education - but also to meet the needs of a new userbase in the UK’s primary and secondary schools.

What helped make JANET successful?

A number of factors contributed to the success of the JANET project..some technical, some political and some organisational. Some of the key factors were:

An initial exploration and confirmation of the feasibility of national networking (known as The Wells Report, 1976).
A few senior, far-sighted, people who backed the project and its work for many years, and the dedication and hard work of the hundreds of people who worked collaboratively and constructively on the project for over 30 years (1975 - present).
A lead agency (the Science and Engineering Research Council) hosted a small central team (the Network Unit, then the Joint Network Team, JNT) and provided a strong technical environment. The team was from a technical, applied data communications background, with advanced administrative support. Subsequently a team was established to run the core national operational services (the Network Executive), and later on a customer services arm was added.
Establishment of a networking community of technical professionals from academic computing service centres and research groups, initially by annual networkshops but then more by use of e-mail and specialist subgroups.
A lead agency adopted a funding role – the Computer Board of the Department of Education, and the use of central funding.
Integrated wide area and local area network programmes using compatible non-proprietary networking standards. Plans for local area and wide area infrastructures were funded in line with the core standards. The plans were developed in discussion with members of the central JANET team, who had individual regional and technical responsibilities.
A political environment in the 1980’s which allowed the implementation of a private, community-specific, national infrastructure.
Adoption and promotion of non-proprietary standards for data communications, both for networking components and applications. Where key products did not exist a development programme was used to fund the necessary work. This programme complemented an aggressive procurement policy for major IT procurements in the academic and research community, which used adherence to key data communications standards as a lever to promote the availability of networking products, and the associated interworking.
The emergence of a joint organisation spanning the higher education and research councils' communities (and subsequently other parts of the academic and research communities), with representation from major stakeholders, to have oversight of the national networking activities - currently part of the JISC.
A move to international standards, and active participation in the international equivalents of the JANET organisation.

Regional Networks

The JANET network is implemented through 20 regional network operators (RNOs) which connect universities, colleges and schools to the JANET network. Most RNOs are operated as independent entities working under contract to JANET(UK), though JANET(UK) operates a small number of RNOs directly.

Each RNO covers a specific geographical area, as of 2007 the following regional networks are connected to JANET:

AbMAN The Aberdeen Metropolitan Area Network
C&NLMAN The Cumbria And North Lancashire Metropolitan Area Network
Clyde-net The Glasgow and Clydeside Network
EaStMAN The Edinburgh and Stirling Metropolitan Area Network
EastNet The Eastern Regional Area Network
EMMAN The East Midlands Metropolitan Area Network
FaTMAN The Fife and Tayside Metropolitan Area Network
Kentish MAN The Kent Metropolitan Area Network
LMN The London Metropolitan Network
LenSE The Learning Network South East
NNW Network North West
MidMAN The Midlands Metropolitan Area Network
NIRAN The Northern Ireland Regional Area Networking
NorMAN The North East Metropolitan Area Network
NWMAN The North Wales Metropolitan area Network
SWERN The South West England Regional Network
SWMAN The South Wales Metropolitan area Network
TVN The Thames Valley Network
UHIMI The University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute Network
YHMAN The Yorkshire and Humberside Metropolitan Area Network

References

External links

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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 03:28:06 PDT (GMT -0700)
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