UK JANET Network Scales Towards 400Gbps

A £30 million overhaul of the UK’s higher education computing network JANET has been completed.

Dubbed JANET 6, the project has been managed by the higher education IT consortium Jisc. It has 10 times the capacity of the current system and aims to satisfy the demand of UK universities and scientific institutions until 2022.

The network will be at the cutting edge of UK research, particularly as academia is relying on more data-intensive research and high-performance computing.

Damn it that’s fast JANET

JANET’s head of strategic technologies, Jeremy Sharp, said that he finished transferring the last of the backbone of JANET 5 to the new JANET 6 system and the whole network was live today.

JANET 6 will cater for the large volume of data transmitted between the UK and such institutions as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) and service unpredictable information needs in fields such as biomedical sciences, genomics and climate science.

Sharp said that the project was extremely challenging, particularly as it used cutting edge networking technology and can manage 100G bandwidth speeds. When they started planning the project, 40G was considered cutting edge.

The network is based around Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platform, equipped with WaveLogic Coherent Optical Processors, which will enable the network to easily scale from 100G as requirements change. The Janet 6 spec also stretched Jupiter’s latest high-end unified carrier switches to their maximum.

“We have planned and estimated that our bandwidth requirements will double every 10 months, so we wanted to make sure that we developed an infrastructure that could grow,” Sharp said. Theoretically, Janet 6 could scale to 400G as the technology becomes available.

The project was also testing for SSE Telecoms, which scored the contract to put down the fibre backbone, which was completed in March. That particular project represented the largest fibre project of its type conducted in the UK in 2013.

However, despite all that, the project went off completely to schedule and was managed within its £30 million budget, Sharp said.

Can you rely on your cloud knowledge? Take our quiz!