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 other national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, facilitating collaboration on a wide range of projects. GÉANT also provides onward connectivity to NRENs in all other world regions. This global ‘network of networks’ is often termed the GREN (Global Research and Education Network), and needless to say this arrangement is vital to the operation Janet and is what enables UK institutions to collaborate internationally.
Much like Jisc, GÉANT is a membership organisation, Jisc and the majority other European NRENs are members. In terms of network traffic Jisc is one of the biggest users of GÉANT, so it’s vital we engage with our European partners at all levels at every opportunity to ensure we continue to provide the best service to our members and customers in the UK. To further highlight the importance of GÉANT from a UK perspective, Heidi Fraser-Krauss, Jisc CEO, is also a member of the GÉANT Board.
Strategy
Every autumn GÉANT holds a strategy workshop for its members where it presents updates and developments from a European perspective, and invites members to discuss experiences from their own country, all to ultimately help steer GÉANT priorities for the year(s) ahead. I recently attended the 2024 strategy workshop where, in a room with 80 delegates from across Europe, I represented Jisc from a network perspective. The event was split across two days, with a variety of topics covered.
Cloud & Data Flows: the crux of this session was that GÉANT is seeing traffic growth on its network slow (to be clear, traffic is still growing, just not at the same rate as previously) and is interested to understand why. For Jisc, traffic continues to rise across all domains – on Janet, via direct peerings (with Microsoft, AWS, Google, etc.), and notably to/from GÉANT as well. Other NRENs have observed the same.
Automation: always a hot topic, for lots of reasons. Every NREN, Jisc included, is on an automation journey, all at different stages of progress and maturity, but reassuringly all with the same questions, concerns and challenges:
Where to start?
What to automate?
How to ensure a single source of truth?
What tools and systems to use?
Buy or self-build?
How much £/€/$ to invest?
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
This is one of the areas of discussion that is likely to spin-off a dedicated working group to cover in far more detail than the 45 minutes allowed, and Jisc will be front and centre of those conversations with the aim of both ensuring we do what’s best for R&E in the UK, and supporting other NRENs to do the same in their jurisdictions.
Intercontinental Connectivity: the GÉANT team presented status and plans regarding connectivity from Europe to other world regions. There is a lot of activity in this area, and it’s something high on the Jisc agenda to progress as well. There’ll be a separate blog post in future to cover off this subject in a lot more detail.
There were also discussions on Network Security, Quantum and Time & Frequency Networks, subjects that are far too complicated to even scrape the surface of in an article of this nature, but needless to say have a lot of focus within Jisc as complex workstreams in their own right.
Watercooler
As with all such events, a lot of the value happens outside of the formal programme, the watercooler conversations, and there was no shortage here. Jisc is involved in many different projects with NRENs from across Europe, not least those activities that contribute to the overall GÉANT project, and all being together in the same venue – sitting together, having coffee together, having breakfast/lunch/dinner together – presented a great opportunity to engage on all manner of network and network-adjacent activities.
Far too many projects and partners to mention here, but it was further evidence to me that the European ecosystem of people, projects, collaborations and networks remains as important and strong as ever.
Conclusions
All NRENs are different – different countries, different sizes, different members, different funding and different networks. But spending 2 days in a room with the European NREN community reminded me that we are also all very similar – similar experiences, similar challenges and similar cultures.
It’s fundamental to the success of Jisc and Janet that we ensure everything we do in the UK is also done with a view through the lens of education and research networking in Europe, and also further afield.
And finally, much like with Jisc and our own members, it’s vital that GÉANT members are aligned in terms of priorities and challenges, so that as a collective we can effectively contribute to, and help steer, the strategy of GÉANT itself.