FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Project Service Provider Conference Call

Hold the date.

The USAC folks have scheduled a service provider conference call for Thursday, February 7 at 2 pm Eastern time. Details will be posted here when available.

This call is for service providers who might want to bid on the Rural Health Care projects. Services such as network design, network management, and circuit provisioning will be discussed.

A Blueprint for Big Broadband

Our friends at Educause rescently released a new paper entitled "A Blueprint for Big Broadband." Why should you care, you ask? Because universities are still leading the way in deploying and utilizing broadband through local, regional, national and international networks to support their local communities of students, faculty and staff. AND universities are training the next generation of workers who will demand, build and support big broadband.

This report proposes bringing the federal government, state governments, and the private sector together as part of a new approach to making high-speed Internet services available across the country. The report also contains a detailed analysis of broadband deployment in the United States and in key countries around the world.

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/ABlueprintforBigBroadband/45996?time=1201816531

Calit2 and University of Melbourne Initiate Australia's Ultra-Resolution Global Collaboration Laboratory

[Ed Note: a great example of an application utilizing the network capabilities of regional, national, and international optical networks.]

Bringing the OptIPortal and gigabit/s super-broadband networking together is the cutting-edge expertise of two of the world’s leading telecommunications research units: the University of Melbourne School of Engineering’s Centre for Ultra Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN), and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UCSD/UC Irvine partnership.

The link-up was made possible by use of the high-capacity backbone of AARNet, Australia’s academic and research network, with a connection to the U.S. West Coast using SXTransPORT on the Southern Cross Cable Network to the Calit2 network in San Diego via Pacific Wave and CENIC.

Calit2 Director Larry Smarr notes that today’s demonstration marks the entry of Australia into the growing OptIPlanet Collaboratory, enabling innovators around the world to work together on major data-intensive scientific, medical, and environmental challlenges: “Based on today’s success, we will connect other Australian universities with universities in the United States and around the world using these advanced technologies in 2008.”

For the full article, visit http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1219

NIST Publishes a Draft IPv6 Profile in the U.S. Government

On January 23, 2008, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a draft of its document "A Profile for IPv6 in the U.S. Government - Version 1.0." It defines a standards profile for IPv6 in the US Government for non-classified, non-national security federal IT systems. In particular, "This standards profile is meant to: (a) define a simple taxonomy of common network devices; (b) define their minimal mandatory IPv6 capabilities and identify significant configuration options so as to assist agencies in the development of more specific acquisition and deployment plans; and, (c) provide the basis to further define the technical meaning of specific USG policies." Check it out at http://www.antd.nist.gov/usgv6/usgv6-v1-draft2.pdf

GRNOC Real-time Atlas

The Indiana GRNOC announced the availability of its new Real-time Atlas. The Atlas marries network visualization with real-time telemetry. You can use the Atlas at http://atlas.grnoc.iu.edu. Both the NLR FrameNet and PacketNet maps are available.You can find more details in this PDF presentation: http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2008jan/20080121-balas.pdf.

SANRAD Delivers Disaster Recovery

The Northwest Regional Data Center (NWRDC),Florida's leading
computing data center for educational and governmental communities,
has deployed six SANRAD V-Switches to manage growing volumes of
archived data and protect against loss.

NWRDC provides data security, accessibility and connectivity
services to more than 80 Florida-based customers, including K-20
educational facilities, major research universities and local
governments. With a growing customer base and increasing amounts of
data to protect, NWRDC was facing a mounting disaster recovery risk
and dealing with a manual off-site storage process for archive tapes
that was cumbersome and difficult to manage. The NWRDC solution
connects the organization's mainframe system to a pair of SANRAD
V-Switches, which transfer data via the Florida Lambda Rail and
Southern Light Rail dark fiber networks to a Category 5 hot site in
Atlanta. There, NWRDC's data is securely housed and easily recovered
in the event of downtime or disaster.

See the entire release at http://tinyurl.com/2q2agr.

NLR Update at Joint Techs

John Silvester gave an update of NLR activities at the Joint Techs workshop. You can find his slides in both Powerpoint and HTML format at http://tinyurl.com/2xmedx.

Highlights include:
Lighting of the Boston node
Cisco Telepresence support hardware available for use
Availability of dynamic VLAN provisioning