JANET
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the computer network JANET. For other uses, see Janet (disambiguation).
JANET is a private British government-funded computer network dedicated to education and research. All further- and higher-education organisations are connected to JANET, as are all the Research Councils; the majority of these sites are connected via 19 metropolitan area networks across the UK. The network also carries traffic between schools within the UK, although many of the schools networks maintain their own general Internet connectivity. The name is a contraction of Joint Academic NETwork.
It is linked to other European and worldwide NRENs through GEANT, has a private connection to CERNET in China and peers extensively with other ISPs at Internet Exchange Points in the UK. Any other networks are reached via transit services from commercial ISPs.
JANET is operated by a consortium known as the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA), who are also responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains, and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee http://www.jisc.ac.uk
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[edit] Origins
JANET developed out of a number of local and research networks dating back to the 1970s. In the early 80s a standardization and interconnect effort started, hosted on an expansion of the pioneering SERCnet X.25 research network. The system first went live in April 1983, hosting about 50 sites with line speeds of 9.6 kbit/s. In the mid-80s the backbone was upgraded to a 2 Mbit/s backbone with 64 kbit/s access links, and a further upgrade in the early 1990s sped the backbone to 8 Mbit/s and the access links to 2 Mbit/s, making JANET the fastest X.25 network in the world.
The JANET effort resulted in the standardization known as the Coloured Book protocols, which provided the first complete X.25 standard. (One effect of the adoption of Coloured Book was that JANET hostnames were backwards compared to the Internet standard, e.g. UK.AC.HATFIELD.INFSC1 instead of infsc1.hatfield.ac.uk.) There had been some talk of moving JANET to OSI protocols in the 1990s, but changes in the networking world meant this never happened.
[edit] History
In January 1991 the JANET IP Service (JIPS) was set up as a pilot project to host IP traffic on the existing network. Within ten months the IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic, and the IP support became official in November. Today JANET is primarily a high-speed IP network.
In order to address speed concerns, several hardware upgrades have been incorporated into the JANET system. In 1989 SuperJANET was proposed, to re-host JANET on a fibre optic network. Work started in late 1992, and by late 1993 the first 14 sites had migrated to the new 34 Mbit/s ATM system. SuperJANET also moved solely to IP.
In 1995 SuperJANET2 started, adding 155 Mbit/s ATM backbones and a 10 Mbit/s SMDS network encompassing some of the original JANET nodes. JANET's mandate now included running metropolitan area networks centered on these sites.
SuperJANET3 created new 155 Mbit/s ATM nodes to fully connect all of the major sites at London, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds, with 34 Mbit/s links to smaller sites around the country.
In March 2001 SuperJANET4 was launched. The key challenges for SuperJANET4 were the need to increase network capacity and to strengthen the design and management of JANET to allow it to meet a similar increase in the size of its userbase.
SuperJANET4 saw the implementation of a 2.5 Gbit/s core backbone from which connections to regional network points of presence were made at speeds ranging between 155 Mbit/s to 2.5 Gbit/s depending upon the size of the regional network. In 2002 the core SuperJANET4 backbone was upgraded to 10 Gbit/s.
SuperJANET4 also saw an increase in the userbase of JANET with the inclusion of the Further Education Community and the use of the SuperJANET4 backbone to interconnect schools networks. The core point of presence (Backbone) sites in SuperJANET4 were Edinburgh, Glasgow, Warrington, Reading, Bristol, Portsmouth, London and Leeds
In October 2006 SuperJANET5 was launched after £29 million of investment. It provides a 10Gbit/s backbone, with an upgrade path to 40GBit/s over the next few years. SuperJANET 5 is a hybrid network offering, providing both a high speed IP transit service and private bandwidth channel services provisioned over a dedicated fibre network.
The newly enhanced network aims to not only fully accommodate the requirements of all research institutes, universities and further education but also meet the needs of the UK’s primary and secondary schools; thus providing for the first time a unifying resource for education and research across the UK.
