University research overflowing with knowledge
University research overflowing with knowledge
Jul 06, 2005: Higher capacity Internet services are being established for Australian universities, research institutions and education organisations to allow them to communicate valuable information more smoothly between each site.
The Australian Academic and Research Network currently serves more than 1,000,000 end users through member institutions and customers, and in 2004, it delivered almost 1 petabyte of traffic, with traffic expected to grow by 50 percent each year for several years.
Chris Hancock, the CEO of AARNet, said that it is currently building one of the world's most advanced and wide reaching networks for future generations.
"The exciting activities of astronomy, high energy physics and immersive multi-media test the boundaries of our network capacity. Astronomy alone is looking at terabytes nightly.
"The flow-on effects in network development will benefit communications networks around the world. These networks are now among society's most important infrastructures. They are vital to so many sectors of our economy.
The third generation of AARNet's network, AARNet3 will use Juniper Networks M320, M40e and M20 to help it continue to deliver existing and emerging advanced services to its clients.
Mark Prior, AARNet's CTO, said that Juniper's M-series will enable AARNet to continue to support the deployment of advanced IP services.
"In particular, we need to concurrently support IPv6 and multicast traffic, as well as unicast IPv4 traffic, without any loss of performance. We are looking to an operating environment that enhances the robustness of the network and improves reliability and availability."
The AARNet3 backbone network currently provides 10 gigabits per second from Perth to Brisbane, allowing customers to connect at gigabit speeds. It is hoped that the new Juniper M-series will add to significantly add to reliability and performance.
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