CENIC News

As an organization composed of the community it serves, CENIC is in the happy position of having the innovative spirit of the California research and education community as its foundation -- a community that can look forward to a brilliant future despite the financial challenges facing it.

CENIC takes its role in helping that community prevail over those challenges seriously. With the new family of CalREN Cloud Services, above-the-network offerings that CENIC is advancing, we hope to offer cost savings and service enhancements to Associates on a new level, enabling Associates to expand the services they offer to their faculty, students, and staff while adjusting to a leaner budgetary landscape. We will initiate new strategic plans to "get the word out" regarding CENIC's networking innovations, and more importantly, the Associate innovations enabled by advanced networking.

During all of this, we will not lose focus on the CENIC core mission. Every innovation brought about by advanced networking pushes the boundaries further and heightens demand for greater network performance, and after sixteen years of providing advanced network services for the California research and education community, the Gigabit backbone and 155Mb/s connectivity of the past has given way to demands for 10- and 100-Gigabit bandwidth. As these ultra-high-performance speeds become the new standard, CENIC's core mission will remain to ensure that the community we were created to serve continues to enjoy the benefits of cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students.

I'm honored to be a part of CENIC and have the opportunity to enable the achievements of the California research and education community. As illustrious as the past sixteen years have been, I'm certain that even more stunning network-enabled achievements on the part of CENIC Associates are yet to come.

As well as completing the preparations to enable attendees to the CENIC 2012 Annual Conference, Beyond the Network to enjoy full connectivity to CalREN during their stay at the Sheraton Palo Alto, CENIC has completed several major connectivity upgrades during the month of February.

For the University of California, this included upgrades to UC Santa Cruz's connections to both the DC and HPR tiers of CalREN to 10 Gigabit. California's Community Colleges also received a new 100 Mb/s connection between College of the Canyons and its Canyon Country Campus.

Groups to Deploy 100G Networking Capabilities across West Coast, Share Infrastructure, and Work on Network Initiatives

On Feb 7, CENIC, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and Internet2 announced plans for a major, long-term collaboration to deploy 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) networking capabilities across the entire West Coast of the United States, to share a common optical networking infrastructure, and to work on many network based initiatives.

This shared infrastructure, using PNWGP and CENIC fiber-optic cable and Internet2's new Ciena optical system, will initially support the West Coast portion of Internet2's new nationwide backbone network and the advanced Research & Education (R&E) peering and exchange services provided by CENIC and PNWGP. This long-term collaboration includes the Pacific Wave international distributed exchange, whose major exchange and access points in Seattle and Los Angeles are being interconnected with 100 Gbps capacity to support interconnections and transport at 100 Gbps speeds. Twenty-seven networks representing more than 40 countries throughout the Pacific Rim, the Americas, and the Middle East connect to one another via Pacific Wave.

"These 100 Gbps network interconnection and transit capabilities will enable our U.S. and international research partners to achieve the performance and service capabilities required by next generation research initiatives," noted Louis Fox, President and CEO of CENIC.

"This is an extraordinary step forward in cooperation and mutual commitment between Internet2 and two R&E technology leaders, PNWGP and CENIC," said Dave Lambert, CEO of Internet2. "We will work together to best and most cost-effectively serve our overall R&E community with next generation capabilities and services."

"By partnering on this infrastructure, we are able to share our resources and expertise and further leverage our long-term reliance upon Internet2 and also the proven Internet2 network operations center to achieve reliable, ultra-high-performance networking which is affordable for our members and partners," said Amy Philipson, Executive Director of PNWGP.

Internet2, CENIC, and PNWGP also will provide advanced broadband network capabilities, services, content, and applications to expand the U.S. Unified Community Anchor Network's (U.S. UCAN) western community and to existing participants in all three organizations' collective R&E networks.

Ron Johnson, chair, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and Stephen Wolff, chief technology officer, Internet2, both of whose involvements in the Internet date back to the early days of ARPAnet and NSFnet, praised this new partnership and network fabric. Johnson noted that this "establishes the evolved relationship between our organizations as well as the directly shared technical platform that we have all been seeking. This will enable the R&E communities we serve both to pursue the next generation of innovations enabled by our networks, apps, and content, and to extend them for even broader impact to other key constituencies." Wolff echoed these views, saying "thanks to this partnership, there will be many new opportunities for collaboration in the service of our communities and in the advancement of technology."

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) will hold its 16th annual conference, Beyond the Network, March 12-14, 2012, at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto, CA.

Online registration ends soon on March 9, so attendees still have just over a week to visit the conference website and take a look at the online program to plan their trip.

Keynote Speakers are UC San Diego's Amin Vahdat, Director of the Center for Networked Systems, and Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin, formerly Executive Director of the National Broadband Planning effort.

Amin Vahdat is currently a Principal Engineer at Google working on data center architecture. He is on leave from a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego, where he holds the Science Applications International Corporation Chair. Vahdat's research focuses broadly on computer systems, including distributed systems, networks, virtualization, and operating systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and is a past recipient of the the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.

Blair Levin became Communications & Society Fellow with the Aspen Institute after heading the National Broadband Planning effort. He is currently Executive Director of Gig.U, a project within the Institute that seeks to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks and services by using university communities as test-beds. Previously, he had spent eight years as an equity analyst at Legg Mason and Stifel Nicolaus. As Barron's Magazine noted, Levin "has always been on top of developing trends and policy shifts in media and telecommunications -- and has proved visionary in getting out in front of many of today's headline making events." Mr. Levin also served as Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt from 1993 through 1997. Prior to that Mr. Levin practiced law in North Carolina. He is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Conference registration is also open until March 9, with the same flexibility of payment as in previous years. Attendees will have the option to pay for their registration with check or credit cards, before or at the conference.

For attendees who are unable to be there in person, the conference will once again be webcast live and archived by Gold Sponsor NCast. CENIC would also like to thank Titanium Sponsor Cisco Systems, Platinum Sponsors Level3 Communications, AT&T, Broadsoft, Brocade and Comcast Business Class, and Gold Sponsors Amazon Web Services, HP, NCast, Time Warner Cable Business Class, and WTC Consulting, Inc. for being such valued supporters of our annual conference and for their support of the California research and education community.

See you in Palo Alto soon!

One of the most disheartening barriers to any learner's desire to complete a program is not having access to instructional software, courseware, documentation, or other aides to effective learning. Unfortunately, many students in California face challenges in gaining the needed means to access instructional resources outside of the classroom. An increasing number of what are referred to as "gatekeeper" courses and many occupational programs are using software, electronic media and courseware, and utilities to enhance instruction, but students on the wrong side of the digital divide and who do not have consistent access to these resources usually will not succeed, and certainly not gain a mastery of the content. Because of this, projects that enable students to access quality learning resources like course software and cloud storage can play a vital role in fulfilling the mission of California's Community Colleges, which is to serve any student capable of benefiting from instruction.

Fulfilling this mission with the use of network-enabled technology was the purpose of Mt. San Jacinto College's Belinda Heiden Scott, Associate Professor of Business Education and Distance Education Coordinator, project leader of the college's Remote Desktop Services project together with Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems and Microsoft Networking Guy Reams. Scott has been teaching Computer Applications and Office Technology since 2003 and became a full-time faculty member at Mt. San Jacinto College in 2007. She has over 20 years experience working with corporate executives and business owners in diverse industries, and has coached, consulted, and facilitated training programs for fortune 500 companies prior to and during her time at Mt. San Jacinto.

The Remote Desktop Services project is two-fold: it allows for all learners the ability to access course software and personal cloud storage anytime anywhere with an Internet connection, and it also utilizes the system to publish software to the classroom and lab desktops. The RDS project has the added benefit of providing 20 times the capacity for around a third of the cost (in comparison to a traditional 30-workstation lab). Offsite access to district applications and resources is made through a secured web portal which follows the learner from course to course and computer to computer wherever they may be, providing a reliable place to save work, access technical programs, and applications as needed from anywhere.

To learn more about the other Star Performers that CENIC has featured, please visit our website at www.cenic.org.

US & World Networking News:

Internet2 announced this month that Ohio and Indiana are the first states to launch a 100 gigabit per second (Gbps) research and education network by connecting to Internet2's Advanced Layer 2 network -- the first transcontinental 100 Gbps network in the world. The network serves as an innovation platform that connects higher education institutions throughout the world.

The FCC announced the start of the 2012 Measuring Broadband America process, issuing a Public Notice (PN) to announce the start of the next round of tests and calling on consumers across the country to volunteer as participants.

The U.S. Unified Community Anchor Network (U.S. UCAN) today announced the selection of 14 affiliate program participants to facilitate advanced and innovative broadband applications to help community anchor institutions.

IlliniCloud, which provides access to virtual services, online storage, and high-speed network conductivity, has found solutions that work for school districts—and saves them money. Each school district that joins IlliniCloud can potentially reduce its spending on information technology by 30 to 50 percent. [...] Already, 200 school districts in the state use the service.

Following a major e-textbook pilot last year, the California State University System announced that it has cut a deal with Cengage Learning that could give students steep discounts on that publisher's e-textbooks.

In the 3,200-student East Haven schools in Connecticut, elementary teachers did their initial student reading assessments a bit differently this school year.

Instead of using paper and pencil to jot down observations about each of their students and then collecting and analyzing those notes by hand, each teacher used an iPad to collect the information and send it to a centralized database.

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

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