02 June 2010 | Cambridge, UK
Different perspectives on the role of NRENs in the take-up of services
An engaging panel session took place on Tuesday 1 June at TNC 2010. Chaired by Alberto Perez-Gomez from RedIRIS, it brought together disparate members of the research networking community to present their views of the multi-NREN collaboration in GÉANT and the challenges faced.
Alberto set the scene with boating analogies of NRENs, pondering whether they were the equivalent of flashy yachts serving a privileged minority, dull but efficient cargo ships doing nothing but carrying large amounts of data, or small tugboats leading huge ships to their important destinations. Whatever the analogy, what NRENs can do together was the focus of the discussion.
Ivan Maric preferred an orchestral analogy: the key objective of GÉANT is to deliver real value and benefit to society by enabling the research community in Europe and around the world to transform the way they work together. The 32 European NREN partners in GÉANT belong to an orchestra but often rehearse separately and play different pieces of music. There are some large orchestral sections, some new players, some very modern and innovative sections, and occasionally the whole orchestra plays very well together to applause from the users.
Huib-Jan van Langevelde, representing the perspective of one set of GÉANT users, the JIVE radio-astronomers, explained that there are many and varied perspectives of a single situation. The radio-astronomy community’s view is that they need more dynamically-allocated connectivity, bandwidth, storage and computing. He stressed that the gathering of large amounts of data from one telescope for example, was of little value. It is when the data from all the telescopes is gathered together and analysed as a whole, that the real value of the project is delivered.
Tim Marshall, CEO of JANET, sees NRENs progressively replacing the “great god in the sky” approach with a more market-oriented one and feels they need to realise their customers require trustworthy, reliable, appropriate and useful services. They do not want to be part of a R&D process, they expect tried and trusted solutions delivered professionally. “We need to raise our game,” he says, “and become truly service oriented in approach.” Tim presented a variation on the apostle Paul’s epithet on love: “Finally, my brothers and sisters, three things remain: excellence, innovation and service. And the greatest of these is service.”
Jim Williams from Indiana University reminded us that science – and therefore networking – is global, and highlighted the need for political, operational and organisational support for domain-spanning services, involving end-to-end tools, transient infrastructure provisioning, cross-domain security and operations. Looking to the future, he sees challenges arising in the development of 40/100G capacity which will bring a further set of problems to be addressed, including bottlenecks and security.
Jean-Luc Dorel of the European Commission explained that the EC’s expectations of GÉANT are that it provides a mature infrastructure – accessible, transparent and reliable – allowing equal access to knowledge for Europe’s research community to support the ‘digital agenda’, and that it addresses relevant global challenges through fruitful international collaboration. He pointed out that Europe’s diversity is a great advantage which should be capitalised on in the development of multi-domain services. The EC also expects the NREN community to take advantage of the opportunity to innovate within GÉANT, producing ideas which ultimately become approved standards supporting new services.
Elaborating on the subject of innovation, Ivan Maric reminded us that the role of an NREN is about more than just providing a service to the user: they are also expected to play an experimental or trailblazing role on behalf of their communities, whilst Huib-Jan van Langevelde pleaded for a model which is about more than Key Performance Indicators and Critical Success Factors; close collaboration with users is required for the innovative use of networks. Such users are pushing the boundaries of knowledge and have not necessarily defined their end-point in advance. Tim Marshall added that providing a support structure for users permits them to be more creative and productive, not less, and that measured feedback from such customers is very valuable.
In working together and trying to provide pan-European services to the millions of European users, one particular challenge faced by NRENs is the need to establish good relations with users. Good relations are built over many years, involving two-way communication, different methods and channels. Such effort puts NRENs such as CARNET, which has taken a strong customer-focussed approach, in a strong position to promote GÉANT services with their user community and achieve successful adoption of services such as eduroam, for example, as a result. Ivan Maric believes the challenge is for NRENs across Europe to develop strong customer relations so as to be able to successfully implement GÉANT services.
As an example of the importance of collaboration, Jim Williams observed that it is important for all levels of network – local, national and international – and that whilst it’s important to have effective mechanisms in place, collaboration can produce more subtle and refined responses than simply cutting off all the traffic from a particular source.
Jean-Luc Dorel added that the community must impress on political decision-makers, who ultimately control the provision of funding for research networking, that a good return on investment is being provided: the GÉANT collaboration is being supported in the hope it will bring a benefit, but effort needs to be put into ensuring politicians actually understand the benefit it delivers to society in a time of economic crisis.
Speaking from the audience, Kees Neggers of SURFnet added that no single solution can address the needs of the research community, and advocated interworking opportunities amongst all players worldwide to maximise progress.
In conclusion, international collaboration is key to providing a good service to the user but it is challenging and the achievement of 36 countries working in concert to provide a service should not be underestimated. Rigorous service control, management and measurement is not incompatible with researchers’ needs but room must be left for innovation to flourish. The achievements realised need to be communicated successfully to politicians to show their support for our collaboration is justified.
