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Networking/Innovators
10/20/2005
Two innovative institutions move toward 21st-century networking and create models for other colleges and universities to pursue.
WHEN IT COMES TO NETWORKING, everything is new under the sun—at least, to colleges and universities looking for new ways to expand and enable connectivity on campus and beyond. For the two universities profiled here, new technological advances, groundbreaking Internet service providers, and thinking past the immediate curve were key.
Innovation: Forging a Super-Powered Converged Network
Innovator: Florida International University Interviewees: John P. McGowan, CIO and VP for Information Resources; Al Losada, director of Enterprise Technology and Support System and services background.
FIU operates the Miami-based AMPATH GigaPOP, a major point of presence for traffic to and from Latin America and throughout the Caribbean. [Editor’s note: The Webopedia (www.webopedia.com) defines GigaPOP as follows: “Short for gigabit Point of Presence, a network access point that supports data transfer rates of at least 1Gbps. Currently, only a few gigaPOPs exist, and they’re used primarily for accessing the I2 network. Each university that connects to I2 must do so through a gigaPOP, which connects the university’s LANs and WANs to the I2 network. Originally, 12 gigaPOPs were planned, each one serving half a dozen I2 members, but the number of gigaPOPs is likely to grow. Whereas the POPs maintained by ISPs are designed to allow low-speed modems to connect to the Internet, gigaPOPs are designed for fast access to a high-speed network, such as I2.] GigaPOP partners of FIU include CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), the University of Illinois-Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and the University of São Paulo (Brazil). Petabytes of data from astronomical observatories and high-energy physics research projects comprise some of the bandwidthintensive traffic into and out of the GigaPOP.
FIU also boasts a very robust internal campus network that carries converged voice and data traffic including unified messaging (combined voicemail and e-mail). It has a university-wide VoIP system and operates a 12-seat Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com) IPCC Express call center that takes 100,000 calls per year. The call center began life providing technology help desk services, utilizing BMC Remedy software (www.remedy.com). It was recently expanded to include enrollment support to better respond to student needs.
Network as the Great Enabler for Faculty and Students. So, how d'es
this infrastructure benefit faculty and students? One way is via the creation
of an on-campus grid of faculty computers to apply enhanced processing to collaborative
research projects that need teraflops (measures of computer speed expressed
as “a trillion floating point operations per second”) of processing power. The
grid is also being extended to programs in biology, including a biodiversity
project in Panama, and a partnership with the
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today. The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates. At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features. The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning. Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development. Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
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