JISC

In January, JANET won the Shared Services category of the eGovernment awards. The award recognises 'proven shared services which have delivered effective services and efficiency gains' and was presented by John Suffolk, Government Chief Information Officer.

This was followed up in April by a second award, again for shared services, this time in the Government Computing Awards for Innovation. The awards, founded in 1996, recognise public sector organisations that have harnessed technology to provide better services and a better deal for the taxpayer, and were presented by Michael White of the Guardian.

The JANET Lightpath service was launched in November 2007 to meet the growing needs of the UK research communities for dedicated end-to-end network capacity. The service provides segregation of research traffic from normal JANET service traffic and enables the UK's research communities to transmit large volumes of data or delay-sensitive data across the network.

The last year also saw the launch of JANET Aurora, a high quality fibre network that provides a platform for Photonics and Optical Systems research. With approximately 350km of dedicated fibre, this is amongst the largest test-beds for optical networking research in Europe and enables a wide range of projects that hitherto have been impossible on existing research network infrastructures.

International collaboration remained central to JANETs continued development and the last year saw astronomers in the UK link to the GÉANT2 network via JANET to track transient events right at the edge of the known universe, thanks to the European Union’s (EU) EXPReS project. GÉANT2 and its European partners such as JANET now connect four of Europe’s biggest radio astronomy facilities using high-bandwidth point-to-point circuits allowing researchers to work together simultaneously and create, in effect, a single telescope as large as Europe.

Take up of the JANETtxt SMS service surpassed 1 million messages earlier this year. With over 100 educational organisations now using the service, JANETtxt provides cost effective communications for staff and students in areas as diverse as administrative notifications for lecture changes or exam results, student mentoring, business continuity planning, library returns and leisure activities.

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its work to re-create the ‘Big Bang’ at CERN in Switzerland earlier this year, JANET prepared to play its part in the worldwide distribution of the five gigabytes per second of data that will be pumped out of the site on resumption of its operations next year. Due to the huge amounts of data generated by the experiments, this will be distributed among a number of collaborating organisations via the LHC Computing Grid (LCG). Data will be carried end to end on a dedicated lightpath from CERN to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory using the GEANT and JANET networks.

By the end of the academic year 2007-08, nearly 500 institutions and organisations successfully completed the transition to a new open standard federated access management system through the UK Access Management Federation. Over 90% of HE institutions and more than half of further education providers have joined the Federation. The federation, operated by JANET(UK) on behalf of JISC and Becta, will provide access to approximately 8 million users across the UK and brings the entire UK education and research sector a step closer to achieving single sign-on to network and online resources.

Ongoing support arrangements were also confirmed during the last year and the UK Access Management Federation will provide the first port-of-call through the JANET helpdesk. Training is being made available through both JANET and Netskills, as well as through events organised by Regional Support Centres across the country. JISC also confirmed that funding for a further three years will be provided for Service Provider support, continuing the work of the Access Management Team and JISC Collections to bring publishers and other service providers in to the UK Access Management Federation.

Further information on any of the services highlighted above.