The perfSONAR toolkit is an open source network measurement package designed to provide multi-domain network monitoring and establish end-to-end network usage expectations. It has proven popular in research and education networks, particularly for communities who move large volumes of data over significant distances. For example, sites taking part in CERN’s Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing […]
European engagement
Writing this as I sit at Schiphol airport waiting for my delayed flight (due to snow, there was barely a dusting) back to Heathrow. Some reflections on 2 days spent in Amsterdam with peers and colleagues from across Europe. GÉANT GÉANT is the pan-European network for the research and education community. It connects Janet and roughly 40 […]
LINX 123
The 123rd member meeting of LINX (formerly the London Internet Exchange) took place on the 20th and 21st November, 2024. This also marked the 30th anniversary of the creation of LINX. For those that don’t know, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are locations where a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) […]
RIPE 89
Introduction The last Monday in October saw my alarm set for 02:45 in order to catch a 05:55 flight from Manchester Airport to head to Prague for RIPE 89. There are a number of reasons I participate in RIPE meetings. First of all, the RIPE community sets the policies by which Jisc, and other service […]
The Move from Member to Jisc
A while back, after almost a decade of making (and sometimes breaking) networks at a university, I began searching for the next chapter in my career. My past experiences have been with large network vendors, small resellers and end customers, but never a service provider. The connection with the sector I’d grown to know and […]
#NDN2024
Earlier this month was the NORDUnet conference where me and 2 colleagues from Jisc joined 270 other delegates from NRENs across the world to share, learn and collaborate. The event took place in Bergen, Norway: NORDUnet represents the 5 Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – so the event has a strong […]
Today, 6th June 2022, marks the tenth anniversary of the World IPv6 Launch, an event that saw many ISPs and content providers turn on IPv6 access to their services for the first time. In this article, we reflect on an IPv6 use case that’s now seeing 100Gbps of IPv6 traffic traversing Janet. The Large Hadron […]
Protecting networks, systems and users isn’t getting any easier. Whether it’s nation states looking for intellectual property to steal; criminals looking for ways to make money through ransomware or scamming users; or students launching denial of service attacks in the modern equivalent of setting the fire alarm off to get out of an exam, the […]
Is it time to consider streaming telemetry?
Traditionally network monitoring of properties such as traffic levels through an interface has been done by using SNMP-based polling of network devices. With such polling typically performed every five minutes the resulting plots will produce 5-minute data samples, so the traffic level shown over time, and the maximum rates seen, will be an average for […]
Janet & 5G
This article explores what Jisc is doing to support 5G activities across the UK, and how 5G technology is being trialled as a way of providing connectivity to Jisc members and customers. Note: Jisc is not planning to provide a 5G service, more looking at how 5G could be used as an alternative technology to […]