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Jisc's super-fast network arrives 'on time and in budget', says incoming chair. Chris Parr reports.
A Pounds 25 million computer network designed to serve the needs of the UK's higher education sector for the next decade has arrived after three years of development.
The JANET 6 network, running on more than 650,000km of optical fibre, will be capable of carrying 8.8 terabits of data at any given time (the equivalent to some 480 piles of printed paper, each stacked as high as the Eiffel Tower). It is hoped that it will enable the UK's colleges and universities to cope with the ever-increasing amount of information they need to transmit each year.
According to Jeremy Sharp, head of strategic technologies at JANET, the network will enable researchers across the country to collaborate on projects that might previously have proved difficult - such as those that require "big data" to be sent between institutions.
"We have fundamentally constructed the architecture of JANET 6 to cope with the very high bandwidth requirement of the research community," Mr Sharp said, adding that the network would facilitate more effective interaction with overseas universities, particularly on data-intensive projects. Disciplines such as genomics, biomedical sciences and climate science are known to be particularly data-hungry.
The increased bandwidth was also required to meet the needs of the growing number of institutions opting to outsource services such as email to companies that store information "in the cloud", meaning it can only be accessed by users over an internet connection, he said.
"Universities are increasingly reliant on the cloud, and...