Bill St. Arnaud

NORDUnet's brilliant Internet peering strategy

2012-01-26T07:56:00.001-08:00

[NORDUnet, the R&E network connecting the Nordic countries has recently undertaken a brilliant Internet peering strategy that will have global significant ramifications for supporting research and education around the world.
NORDUnet is now emerging as one of the world’s first “GREN”s – Global Research and Education Network. NORDUnet is extending their network infrastructure to multiple points of presence throughout the USA and Europe to interconnect to major Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). This will allow them to negotiate as a Tier 1 Internet service provider and exchange traffic with other global commercial Tier 1 Internet transit providers. NORDUnet is also playing a global leadership role by extending this service offering, on a shared cost basis, to NRENs such as SURFnet (Netherlands), PIONIER (Poland) and perhaps others.

Many network operators ask why they should build an extensive peering network when transit prices are only marginally more expensive than peering (and still dropping)? The NORDUnet engineering team are one of the first to understand that Internet peering is not about cost comparison between peering and transit pricing.

Most universities (as well as consumers and business) have a fixed budget for Internet connectivity. So regardless of traffic volumes they can only spend so much money for Internet transit. As result many institutions cap traffic volumes to commercial transit providers. But peering traffic is done on a settlement free basis and therefore traffic volumes are not linearly related to cost. Many NRENs have discovered that content peering traffic has a huge benefit for their connected institutions in stabilizing costs without restricting use of the network. On some NRENs, content peering traffic is now 90% of their overall traffic volume. By connecting to the major IXPs in the USA, NORDUnet can eliminate purchase of virtually all transit traffic. Traffic volumes are expected to immediately jump because now institutions will not have to cap formerly transit traffic.

This arrangement will have a huge benefit for the research community as more and more computational research is done on commercial clouds in the US. NORDUnet realizes, that despite concerns about US Patriot Act, researchers are voting with their wallets and using commercial cloud providers and value added cloud providers in the US. Many research disciplines, especially genomics and bio-informatics are being increasingly dependent on commercial application providers, because they have the necessary tools critical to their research. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to as they have found life sciences a fertile market for products that handle large amounts of information. Access to these commercial organizations through the commercial Internet or Open Lightpath Exchanges is essential for the future of research.

This initiative by NORDUNet will have profound implications for the future of the Internet and data intensive science. The obvious next step after exchanging peering traffic is also to use this links for dynamic lightpaths and virtual networks for large data flows. It is no surprise that networks like NORDUNet and SURFnet are also leading the developments of dynamic optical networking through GLIF. The other important development is for other NRENs to build similar global links and exchange peering routes so collectively they can represent themselves as a global Tier 1 and finally eliminate the archaic telco business models that currently dominate the Internet. This will significant benefits for those NRENs who are deploying community IXPs and can extend the benefits of content peering to community anchors and support community broadband developments.

Peering traffic also goes hand in hand with dynamic optical networks and GOLEs. Some NRENs are under pressure by some large institutions threatening to leave. Some institutions think that by directly connecting to a GOLE and purchasing commercial Internet for the balance of their traffic is all they need for R&E connectivity But peering dramatically changes the balance as it is a service and business model that is not available from commercial providers. The cost savings are dramatic for the connected institution and it does not cripple researchers accessing commercial research services such as clouds because of traffic caps

Once again, NRENs and GRENs are demonstrating their important role in redefining the critical role of the Internet and creating new opportunities for the global informational economy. Kudos to NORDUnet.

------
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Data Intensive Science in a Carbon Constrained World with Software Defined Networks

2012-01-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

[I had the honor of being invited to give the keynote at the recent Internet 2 Joint Techs workshop. I am very excited to see the new direction of Joint Techs to spend one day focusing on a single topic – as an experimental “Call for Action.”
This is especially timely as the NSF is once again exploring the idea to fund a new type of “connections” program to address many of the campus connectivity issues with respect to providing high bandwidth connections to researchers. One of the parameters they may want to explore is “green” or “energy efficient” network solutions.

As I mentioned in my talk we need to rethink our campus network architectures. One of the factors is that driving this rethink is the need to adapt to a much warmer planet and what that implies in terms of the reliability and high cost of energy. Disaster recovery planning does not only mean planning for earthquakes and fires, but also the consequences of living in a much warmer planet where there are significant droughts and floods.

Overall IT electricity consumption is projected to grow to much as 40% of all electrical consumption by 2030, according to the IEA. The R&E sector is one of the biggest consumers of that IT electrical consumption. In addition to starting to planning about climate change impacts on R&E networks, we are facing a deluge of new data and computation demands which is furthering putting pressure on the human resources and energy demands of many campuses. Already the high cost of energy, and its reliability are driving many institutions to explore outsourcing many compute and network services. A good example is “Holyoke project” where 5 universities in Boston are partnering to build a green datacenter 90 miles of Boston to collocate their computing resources.

Building these types of condominium data centers will also require condominium networks so that the institutions can connect to their appropriate resources. Software defined networks (SDN) such as OpenFlow (and earlier experimental variants like UCLP) deployed by NRENs will allow these institutions to extend their LANs past their physical presence of the campus to remote facilities such as condominium data centers, commercial clouds, etc. SDN will also deployment of wide area federated wireless solutions integrating campus WiFi. A good example of the power of SDN is the recent demo carried out by the Greenstar network to use OpenFlow to move virtual machines from Europe to North America as part of their follow the wind/follow the sun green cloud /network research.

My presentation at Internet 2 Joint Techs is available at:
http://events.internet2.edu/2012/jt-loni/agenda.cfm?go=session&id=10002174&event=1223

NSF possible solicitation
http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012winter/20120124-Thompson-NSF.pdf

------
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Why Software Defined Networks and WiFi 2.0 are critical to future of Internet

2012-01-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

[Here are two excellent articles on Software Defined Networks (SDN) and WiFi 2.0.
As the article on SDN points out, the big advantage of SDN, whether it is OpenFlow, UCLP or similar technology is that it empowers customers to create their own network solution. Empowering users enables innovation and creates new business opportunities. Empowering carriers, on the other hand, stifles innovation and results in attempts to extract revenue through monopoly rent e.g UBB. This is why these two technologies are so important for R&E networks – because their primary mission should be empowering researchers and educators to enable new modalities and innovation in delivery of their primary mission of research and education. R&E networks that act and look like carriers, are not fulfilling their primary mission, and to my mind are ultimately doomed.

SDN is so important these days, because unfortunately most large Internet equipment manufacturers, over the past few years, have been captured by the large carrier mindset and are seeing far less innovation in this marketplace. Carrier mindset capture is not a good thing – we have seen the tragic consequences in Canada. Most of Canada’s high tech companies like Nortel, RIM, Alcatel-Lucent (Newbridge), etc are struggling or have gone under because they pursued this market. While the carrier market is extremely lucrative, once inside the door, it puts blinders on the companies serving that market. Nortel is a classic example. Despite being a multi-billion dollar company it really only had 5 major customers – all incumbent telcos. The whole organization revolved around satisfying the needs of these 5 large customers. Despite many failed attempts to make a right hand turn towards the Internet, the demands of these 5 customers distorted all other values in the company. A classic example of this perversion of values is Nortel’s infamous “Web tone” strategy. That one simple phrase, to my mind, says it all in what is wrong with serving the carrier market. And despite over 20 years of Internet growth, things have hardly changed.

RIM now is going down the same path as Nortel. It too has based its entire business strategy of marketing through the carriers. Only belatedly it is now attempting to follow Apple and market directly to end users. But after a decade of working closely with telcos it is hard to imagine they will be able to change their corporate culture sufficiently enough and fast enough in order to survive.

This cozy relationship between equipment manufactures and carriers in Canada, was largely driven by Canada’s restrictions on foreign competition in the telecom marketplace. As a consequence of Canadian legislation restricting foreign carriers, Canadian carriers have remained the most profitable in virtually all of the OCED countries. Telecom equipment manufacturers that wanted to grow and survive in this market therefore had to cozy up to these wealthy oligopolies. For a while this was a very successful strategy, when the rest of the world was also dominated by monopoly carriers. But when the rest of the world open up their markets to competition Canadian manufacturers failed to adapt because Canadian carriers had to face very little competition and to this day remain very profitable in comparison to their international counterparts. It was not only equipment manufacturers who suffered, but Canada’s academic research community as well. Because the telcos, and their captive suppliers, were the only ones who had the funds to support academic research, combined with a big emphasis by Canadian funding council on industrial partnerships, most academic research unsurprisingly focused on telecom issues. Canadian academia largely missed the boat on academic Internet research, and to this very day still remains a bit player in terms of Internet network research issues.

This finally brings up the issue of Wifi 2.0. As the article below states, Wifi 2.0 and Next Gen Wifi is clearly focused on the carrier market and the Hotspot operators are being largely ignored in these developments. The R&E network community is demonstrating there is an alternate architecture for this market that empowers end users. The SURFnet WifI/LTE/Eduroam pilot is a good example. Other NRENs such as NORDunet, AARnet and JANET are also doing some interesting work in this space. R&E networks I think have the opportunity to once again demonstrate, as they have done with the development of the original Internet, the web, customer owned fiber, etc that network strategies that empower users such as SDN and enterprise centric WiFi are ultimately the ones that enable innovation and create new market opportunities.
For those who will be attending Internet 2 Joint Tech’s in Baton Rouge, I will be elaborating more on this theme in my keynote talk. – BSA]

Hotspot 2.0 and the Next Generation Hotspot
-------------------------------------------

Hotspot 2.0 and the Next Generation Hotspot initiatives are possibly the most exciting areas of wireless progress occurring in 2012. For starters, these developments have a worldwide scope of influence. The technologies that come to market as a result of these programs will directly affect a large portion of the world’s population. If brought to market with extensibility, they could revolutionize the hotspot ease-of-use and security landscapes. These programs deserve the spotlight.
The Initiatives
Hotspot 2.0 and Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) are highly complementary initiatives, but they are different in scope. Hotspot 2.0 is the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification program that will include a technical specification defining the Hotspot 2.0 technology. Following the Wi-Fi Alliance’s core purpose, Hotspot 2.0 will also be a device certification, based on product interoperability testing, that allows vendors to implement the protocols in a common way.
Hotspot 2.0 is designed for Wi-Fi clients and infrastructure devices to support seamless connectivity to Wi-Fi networks.
[…]
Unfortunately, the Hotspot 2.0 program is still largely focused around telecom carriers and mobile network operators instead of public hotspot operators, which is where we need change. Hotspot 2.0 should pave the way for this change over time, but it is less of a focus in the short-term future.

How does Openflow and SDN help Virtualization/Cloud
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://sunaytripathi.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/how-does-openflow-and-sdn-help-virtualizationcloud/
Introduction to Software Defined Networking and OpenFlow
Often time I hear the term Openflow and Software Defined Networking Networking used in many different context which range from solving something simple and useful to literally solving the world hunger problem (or fixing the world economy for that matter).
[…]
Openflow creates a standard around how the management interface or Controller talks to the equipment so the equipment vendors can design their equipment without worrying about the management piece and someone else can create a management piece knowing well that it will manage any equipment that support Openflow. So people who understand standards ask whats the big deal? I still can’t do more than what the equipment is designed to do!! And that is the holy grail around any standard. By creating the standard, you are separating the guys who make equipment to focus on their expertise and guys doing management to make the controllers better. This is in no way different than how computers work today. Intel/AMD creates the key chips, vendors like Dell, HP etc. create the servers and Linux community (or BSD, OpenSolaris, etc) creates the OS and it all works together offering a better solution. It achieves one more thing – it drives the H/W cost lower and creates more competition while allowing a end user to pick the best H/W (from their point of view) and the best controller based on features, reliability, etc. There is no monopoly, plenty of choices and its all great for end user.

Specially in the networking space where innovation was lacking for a while and few companies were used to huge margins because users had no choice. One trend that is driving the fire behind SDN is virtualization. Both Server and storage side (H/W and OS) have made good progress on this front but Network is far behind. By opening up the space, SDN is allowing people like me (who are OS and Distributed Systems people) to step into this world and drive the same innovation on network side. So Openflow/SDN are great standards for the end user and people who understand it see the power behind it.

------
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Verizon and Rogers skirt rules on network neutrality versus Free's innovative network

2012-01-10T09:50:00.001-08:00

[From will they ever learn department, we are once again seeing attempts by incumbent carriers to skirt rules around network neutrality.
They tried and failed with UBB. Now they are at it again with “speed boost” technologies. The two technologies at question are Verizon’s “Turbo” service and Roger’s “SpeedBoost”. There are very few technical details, but it appears in the former case that users will be able to purchase additional instantaneous bandwidth to the detriment of other users on the same shared service. Whether this will make a difference to actual throughput is another matter because the slow video may be due to server problems and not network congestion. And if you are in elevator with very poor connectivity, you will unlikely get any faster download speed, no matter how many times you press the turbo button. But will Verizon give you a credit if you don’t get the advertised speed boost? I doubt it. Similarly the Rogers’ service, while still free, seems to imply faster speeds if they detect you are streaming a video, particularly from their own on-line service. Will users who are not streaming video, but using other real time applications get the same benefit such as VoIP or Telepresence? I doubt it.

The carriers continue to have this brain dead idea that bandwidth is a scarce resource – which is only true to the extent that were the ones who created this artificial scarcity. Building a business case around an artificial scarcity is as stupid as trying to make a premium market from air we breathe. Customers aren’t interested in buying bandwidth or quality of service to enhance their user experience. Just as with electricity they want and expect that just about any appliance or application will simply work – with no need for special speed boosts and other gimmicks. Imagine negotiating with the electric utility for a little extra power when you needed to turn on your stove or TV.

It is last mile packet loss which has the biggest impact on the customer’s user experience – NOT bandwidth or congestion. The Internet (TCP/IP) is designed so that packet loss is used as a signaling tool to reduce packet throughput. Regardless of where the packet loss occurs the Internet is designed to slow down any data stream, that is affected by a lost packet. However the rate to which a data stream is slowed down is greatly dependent on distance. This is why moving caching boxes as close as possible to the user affects end-to- end throughput, particularly if there is ongoing packet loss.

Although bandwidth and congestion can be a factors affecting packet loss, there are much more clever ways of reducing the impact of packet loss, especially in wireless environments. There are two much simpler solutions. The first is to locate caching/cloud servers as close as possible to the end users. Something that companies like Akamai and Google do already – at no charge to the carrier. Decreasing wireless distance from the wireless node is the other critical factor. This is why integrating WiFi with 3G/4G is so important.

A good example of a carrier that “gets it” is Free.FR in France. Free.FR is redefining what the idea of a carrier in the 21st century is, thanks to these innovations I have been talking about and pioneered by R&E networks like SURFnet. Integrating a blend of Wi-Fi, 3G and its all-fiber backbone, Free will offer unlimited voice, texting and data over the mobile networks. Free.fr deploys their own set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one’s broadband connection via Wi-Fi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means Free.fr has a free Wi-Fi cloud covering major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband instead of resorting to an expensive 3G network. Their set top box will also allow extreme local caching, to further enhance the user mobile experience. This is the future of broadband. Not silly gimmicks like TurboBoost or SpeedBoost—BSA]

Roger’s SpeedBoost
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/speedboostonsb?setLanguage=en&cm_mmc=Redirects-_-Consumer_Internet_Eng-_-SpeedBoost_0211-_-speedboost

Verizon’s Turbo Boost
http://gigaom.com/mobile/forget-caps-heres-the-next-big-thing-in-wireless-pricing/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

How France’s Free will reinvent mobile
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/09/how-frances-free-will-reinvent-mobile/#OECD #Freemobile

------
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Must read: The year ahead for IT in Higher Ed

2012-01-06T05:17:00.001-08:00

[Here is an excellent article by my good friend Lev Gonick on future trends for IT in Higher Ed.
I have been blogging about many of these trends, especially about how R&E networks and broadband will play a critical role in these developments. For those who will be attending Internet Joint Techs in Baton Rouge I will be expounding on a number of these themes in my keynote talk on how research issues are operational drivers of network research --BSA]

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012

The Year Ahead in IT, 2012
January 6, 2012 - 3:00am
By
Lev Gonick
This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over.
Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education.
The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocational, nonprofit in their sensibilities and at the same time opportunistically commercial, in what Clark Kerr, inThe Uses of the University, called an "aristocracy of intellect" in a populist society. And while reports of the death of the American university are greatly exaggerated, there is an ineluctable force at play that continues to exert growing pressure against the membranes of the higher education ecosystem. The uneven and unequal dynamics of the global economy and information technology are major forces leading to growing pressure for universities to adapt through the process of creative destruction. The emergent trends I note below include disruptive forces that, if history is a guide, will lead future students of the history of technology to note the period ahead as the beginning of the next great tech bubble.
The year ahead may be among the most difficult ever for the economics of postsecondary education in much of the world. At the same time, and in the same time frame, I believe we will see major new developments from the world of information technology that will, over time, lead the university to adapt and enable the familiar institution to not only persist but to maintain its relevance to the disruptive forces of society and economy all around it
Here are the 2012 top 10 IT trends impacting the future of higher education:

1. Open Learning Initiatives Become an Institutional Imperative
Each year for the past three I have noted in this annual column the rise of open learning and open education resources enabled through information and communication technology. This past year’s experimentation by Stanford’s much-publicized global offering to tens of thousands of learners around the world followed by MIT’s MITxinitiative will quickly become a table stakes conversation for most top universities and colleges the world over. The range of subjects, the variety of modalities for delivery, and the extension of learning opportunities around the world are approaching an inflection point. No one can or should ignore the most important and explosive opportunity in postsecondary learning in over half a century. As new massive open online learning environments (MOOLEs) move from a nascent state along the maturity curve economic models, new entrants and laggards, winners and losers, and new centers of knowledge will follow.

2. The United States Launches Next Generation Network Infrastructure and Applications in Partnership with Neighbors and Cities
Boundary-spanning activities are not limited to online learning environments. In 2012, at least two major national next generation network initiatives will be launched. The goal is to create a comparative advantage for the United States in the network-enabled 21st-century economy. The tactical approach is to partner with those prepared to invest, build and operate new gigabit networks in neighborhoods around our universities and colleges as well as offer “above the network” services to our neighbors. The premise is that advanced network infrastructure to the environs around the university will catalyze new, never-before-seen applications and services that will improve the quality of life of millions of Americans who live around our major universities.
Gig.U is a national initiative led by U.S. National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin, designed to create a national partnership among universities, telecommunication providers, and technology companies that leverages blazing-speed wired and wireless networks to build a network of testbed facilities in neighborhoods around our universities. The project draws inspiration from Google’s Gigabit Community initiative that led to the decision to engage with Kansas City and early prototyping some years earlier in Cleveland in the development of OneCommunity and the Case Connection Zone to build gigabit fiber to the home networks and applications.
The second initiative is US Ignite, a multifaceted initiative led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and a new 501(c)3. US Ignite seeks to catalyze and choreograph the development of a new generation of applications that can run on and leverage the next generation networks being deployed by NSF, Google, Internet2, NLR, Gig.U and others.
The opportunity to extend unprecedented network access and services to neighborhoods around our universities will unleash new opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and opportunities for both our postsecondary institutions and the cities and towns within which we live, work and study.

3. Big Data is Here: Getting Beyond the Campus View
Zettabyte-scale data sets (1 billion terabytes) will be here in 2012, if we can achieve three preconditions. Prospects of an emergent zettabyte-scale big science world of proteomic data are being rate limited by existing network capacity, visualization tools for analysis and the encrusted logic of university funding and our IT organizations. Network and storage innovation and visualization and analytical tools will continue to evolve at cloud scale and speed. The prospects of creating a vector in which the technology and our analytical tools meet the needs of our research science community will require some unprecedented collaboration among US funding agencies and our universities. The most exciting development on this front is the set of initiatives led by Internet2 and their NET+ work. Led by former MIT CIO Jerry Grochow, NET+ is our single best opportunity to support big science and to position the United States to be able to compete in the growing competitive international big science playing field.

NET+ is tackling the thorny problem associated with Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction proposition. We can spend the next 25 years in "business as usual mode" attempting to build the infrastructure for big science on each of our university campuses and reinforce the patterns of securing funding, building platforms, and supporting analytical services. We will also miss the train. There is simply no way we can afford to create redundant infrastructure to support the next generation of science, discovery, and innovation. Three-letter federal funding agencies, state economic development and education organizations, research and education networks, research scientists, and of course our higher education leaders, including our CIO community, should join and challenge Net+ to quickly set its sights on the development of an unprecedented collaborative set of platform technologies. The race for big science is on. The stakes are too high to be left to single or even small numbers of campus solutions.

4. Big Data Applied to Creating a New Learning Genome
The promise of massively scalable capacity to enable, track, and assess learning outcomes based on personalized learning needs is both compelling and ready for prime time. Notwithstanding internal debates on learning styles (Pasher, Harold, et al. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9.3 (2009): 105-119), the methods, modeling techniques, and rigor applied to big data science are well positioned to advance our understanding and application of learning sciences. The higher education marketplace is poised to begin marshaling the growing tsunami of data points and apply first generation algorithms to provide both predictive models of learning success and, over time, refine those algorithms to align different learning styles to learning successes.
The framework of a new learning genome begins in earnest in 2012. Look for a wide range of players from Blackboard Analytics, University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Pearson Education, and perhaps ERP players to make a run at an “Enterprise Education Platform.” Startups with secret sauce are ready to scatter their pixie dust on colleges and universities to magically solve everything that ails us, from predictive modeling for retention to career counseling.
Growing interest in big data for college success has many CIOs salivating at the opportunity to build new platforms and realign their organizations to respond to the heightened interest in data-driven decision support. But the science of learning as applied to a new learning genome is in a nascent state. We should be wary of the unbounded enthusiasm that the hype curve will generate in the next year and work on the foundations of campus readiness, governance and partnerships to focus on requirements and advancing our ability to contribute our loaf of bread to the emergent marketplace of “solutions.”

5. SmartPads and New Learning Content
Circa 1993, the most provocative concepts in educational technology were CD-ROM and laserdisc multimedia tools, like Macromedia Director and Bob Stein’s Voyager multimedia publishing ventures that produced works like Who Built America. Then came the World Wide Web. Multimedia education content innovation remained largely frozen in place for nearly 20 years. The emergence of SmartPad technologies has led to a resurgence and revival of interest in multimedia content education. To date we have seen well-financed platform players transpose traditional textbooks and port them over to Kindle, iOS and/or Android environments.
The SmartPad is the experience platform of choice for many students. Value-added functionality for textbooks like highlighting, clipping services, and collaboration tools will continue to extend the value of existing textbook content and the role of the traditional publishing industry. In 2012 a new class of learning content projects that combines advanced multimedia tools and hybrid interactions enabled over the Web will find their way to the mainstream. Look for gaming platforms on SmartPads (with integration on the web) to create quest adventures for disciplines as diverse as history and physical sciences. Traditional research journals in disciplines such as law and medicine will start piloting the integration of multimedia content, well beyond nesting video or hyperlinked content. Areas as diverse as nursing and workforce development will integrate artificial intelligence engines and advanced multimedia learning content to promote simulation experiences to facilitate meaningful use and practice. This emergent market will likely see several large venture back startups this year along with interest from a handful of forward-thinking traditional publishers.

[smip]

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012#ixzz1igRdxyH4
Inside Higher Ed

------
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

The advantage of commercial clouds versus HPC for scientific research

2012-01-04T07:52:00.001-08:00

[The Department of Energy (DoE) recently came out with an excellent report, called the Magellan report, on the advantages and disadvantages of using commercial clouds versus in house High Performance Computers for leading edge scientific research.
The DoE probably supports the largest concentration of HPC facilities in the world. I agree with the report that for traditional applications such as computational chemistry, astrophysics, etc will still need large HPC facilities. But traditional computational intensive applications are becoming a niche market and increasingly many of these applications can now run on specialized commercial “HPC” clouds as for example Nimbix.

The biggest growth in demand for computing is not in computational intensive modeling but data intensive processing. New disciplines such as Astroinformatics, Matinformatics (real-time chemical analysis), Systems biology, Meta-genomics, Computational history, computational linguistics, etc are the driving force for research computing. Most of these data intensive applications are loosely coupled and are ideally suited for using clouds.

While the growth of data intensive science and use of clouds is well recognized, it is still ongoing debate whether researchers should use in-house clouds or commercial facilities. The DoE report did an extensive analysis on the cost of commercial clouds versus in-house facilities. They compared the cost per compute core of an in-house facility versus that of a commercial provider. While I may argue with some of the assumptions in their analysis: for example they did not include cost of money or real estate in their analysis, nor did they use much lower spot market for commercial cloud pricing, I still agree that, in the near term, commercial clouds will be marginally more expensive than in-house facilities.

From a funding agency perspective, however, there is huge advantage of promoting commercial clouds have over an in-house facility. Despite the higher per core costs, the elimination of up-front capital costs of using a commercial cloud is incredibly significant, especially in this time period of fiscal constraint. Any capital expenses that can be delayed or eliminated, and yet not impact the quality of the research, has a huge cost benefit to funding agencies. This is also advantageous to the researcher as well. Usually it takes several years to make a proposal, get approval, acquire and install a large HPC facility. With commercial clouds a researcher can start immediately to undertake their computational research. The upfront cost is very small and their time to market (i.e. publishing the results) can be much faster with a commercial facility. In fact some commercial clouds like Amazon and Azure offer a free pilot service to allow researchers and businesses to migrate their software to the cloud and shake out any possible kinks in their software.

With a commercial facility researchers can scale their application as warranted without incurring any additional capital costs. There is no need for peer review to determine the resources that may be made available to the researcher. More importantly, because the incremental per core costs are very small, many other venues for funding for the computation facility are available, as opposed to the limited funding channels available for the purchase of an in-house facility. For example, some commercial organizations will broker their cloud infrastructure for little or no cost to university researchers, as opposed to commercial users. Many R&E networks are also negotiating significant bulk discounts for commercial cloud services on behalf of the R&E community –BSA]

DoE report
http://science.energy.gov/~/media/ascr/pdf/program-documents/docs/Magellan_Final_Report.pdf

Clouds for HPC applications
http://www.nimbix.net/

Big data can lead to big breakthroughs in research
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/09/BUDC1M9I8A.DTL&type=tech

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

OECD BEREC workshop on Internet peering - how R&E networks can help community broadband

2011-12-20T10:15:00.001-08:00

[Here is a great set of slides put together by Rudolf van der Berg of the OECD on IP interconnection.
As I have blogged many times R&E networks can play a critical catalyst role in helping community broadband initiatives through the deployment of community IXPs and hosting caching services deployed by Google, Akamai, etc. This will help community or public sector broadband networks deliver low cost, high speed services, only available in major centers. These IXPs will also be critical for anywhere, anytime education to provide students at home or work vast and uncongested access to course material from their local educational institution. Good examples of such a strategy are UNINETT in Norway, KAREN in New Zealand and BCnet in British Columbia. For wireless networks community IXPs and the future Internet of Things will be critically important as I have documented in my paper: Future perspectives of R&E networks - http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-clouds-and-r-networks-can-help.html ---BSA]

Slides available: BEREC expert workshop on IP-Interconnection in cooperation with OECD

http://internetthought.blogspot.com/2011/12/slides-available-berec-expert-workshop.html

On November 2nd, BEREC organized a workshop on IP-interconnection together with the OECD. All the slides are now available online and linked below. This was a direct result of the OECD High Level Meeting on the Internet Economy in June, where through conversations in the halls we noticed that there was a difference in the way regulators and Internet peering coordinators discussed interconnection. The workshop was a huge success, several people from the internet peering community flew in from Vienna for one day even though there was a RIPE-meeting going on too.

A couple of points to take away from the meeting are:
• Peering agreements are for 95%+ handshake agreements, without any involvement of lawyers. They take 3 minutes to set up technically.
• Both content providers and eyeball networks are working on getting content closer, faster and cheaper to the consumer. This benefits both parties. An interesting example were Google Content Caches which are now placed in networks around the world, but whose effect can most profoundly be seen in Africa where for instance the traffic over the Kenya Internet Exchange Point increased by 1000megabit/s peak after a cache was installed, saving the local internet community hundred thousands of dollars every month
• The market for peering and transit is highly competitive and highly dynamic, with switching barriers being extremely low. A change in routing from one transit provider to another can literally be done in minutes. The effect of a peering agreement is almost immediate.
• The people whose job it is to interconnect IP-networks speak of themselves as a community, even though some of them disagree quite considerably on how it should be done and who plays what role.
• Peering and transit is done between all kinds of networks, even the European Commission has an AS-number and could set up it's own peerings.
I think everyone looks back at a very successful event, that was seated to capacity.

BEREC expert workshop on IP-Interconnection in cooperation with OECD
November 2nd, Bloom Hotel Brussels, 9:00-17:30

The goal of the workshop is to bring experts from the IP- interconnection community in contact with experts on interconnection from national regulatory authorities and to discuss future interconnection in an all-IP world.

The Internet’s way of using peering and transit as the basis for commercial negotiations differs considerably from the telephony’s world of Calling Party’s Network Pays. As a result even when talking the two worlds seem to be speaking about different things even when using the same words.

BEREC has been looking into these different approaches to interconnection in a series of papers since 2007 (ERG Report on IP-Interconnection 2007, ERG Common Statement on Regulatory Principles of IP Interconnection 2008, BEREC Common Statement on NGN future charging mechanisms, 2010). The OECD has studied Internet traffic exchange in a series of reports in 1998, 2002, 2005 and in a forthcoming paper in 2011. Furthermore, it has studied Internet traffic exchange in relation to the development of local content in cooperation with UNESCO and it has also organized a workshop on the topic in 2001 in cooperation with the German government. IP-interconnection markets are global markets crossing national borders and even continents. Therefore the OECD is singular in its analysis of trends in Internet interconnection taking a global perspective. Following the same objective of safeguarding competition, BEREC and the OECD take this workshop as a starting point hopefully to be continued in the future.

The format of the 4 session is intended to allow for an extensive discussion with the audience.

Programme
9:00-9:30 Registration and Coffee

9:30 – 10:00 Opening words by Monica Ariño, BEREC and Sam Paltridge, OECD

10:00-11:30 Session 1: The background of Internet interconnection
The goal of this session is to outline the basics of Internet interconnection.
Technical background: Peering (paid or free), transit, partial transit, variants (reciprocal transit
etc.), “Public” versus private, application needs for QoS.
• Dennis Weller, Senior Advisor, Navigant Economics "IP Traffic Exchange; Market Developments and Policy Challenges"
• Martin Levy, Director, Hurricaine Electric "The Background of Internet Interconnection"

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-13:00 Session 2: IP interconnection, traffic trends, and implications for
wholesale and retail prices
The interconnection of internet networks has been described in terms of two-sided networks.
The network provider stands in the middle and can receive money from either the content
provider or the consumer. Is this description of the market accurate? What can the theory of
two-sided markets teach us? What contribution can content providers give to the deployment
of networks or alternatively what is the role of network providers in content?
• Scott Marcus, Director, WIK-Consult, "IP interconnection, traffic trends, and wholesale and retail prices"
• Bill Krogfoss, Strategy Director, Chief Technology Office Alcatel-Lucent "Internet Economy and Content Peering"
13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Session 3: IP Interconnection and differentiated QoS
• Mike Blanche, Program Manager - Network, Peering and Content Distribution, Google,
• Falk von Bornstaedt, Head of Peering, Deutsche Telekom "IP Interconnection and differentiated QoS."
• Patrick Gilmore, Chief Architect, Akamai
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:10 Session 4: The Future of Interconnection
The Internet hasn’t done away with telephony as a very important means of communication. The growth of mobile telephony has even been more dramatic than the growth of Internet. There have been calls in academic journals and on regulators directly to both impose the Internet’s way of interconnection on telephony and vice versa the telephony’s way interconnection on the Internet.
• Can we expect the market to evolve into one model or the other for all traffic?
• Could a hybrid model evolve?
• What role will new services on networks play? Will new demands be placed on
• interconnection?
• What characteristics of both models should survive?
Panel:
Eric Ralph, Chief Economist of the Wireline Competition Bureau, FCC (Video message
and telco);
Andreas Sturm, De-Cix;
Mike Blanche, Falk v. Bornstaedt, Patrick Gilmore; Martin Levy

17:10-17:30 Wrap-up
Cara Schwarz-Schilling, BEREC and Rudolf van der Berg, OECD

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Revolutionary developments in on-line education - the role of R&E networks

2011-12-19T07:28:00.000-08:00

[In the past couple of days there was a number of interesting announcements in the world of on-line education.
The first was the announcement by Nature of the release of a new Biology “Textbook” that will only available on tablets like the iPad. http://nyti.ms/uYf7Uu The other announcement is from MIT where they now plan to offer credits for the “MITx” Open Courseware. Automatic systems will and guide the student through the program. http://bit.ly/t1yrLw . Other technologies that could come into play here include automatic transcription, online tutors, and crowdsourced grading. Officials have gone to great pains to state that this will not be the equivalent of getting a degree from MIT, but nevertheless it will expand the breadth of individuals who can claim an educational association with the MIT brand.

In addition to these developments many schools around the world are looking to replace traditional textbooks with tablets such as the iPad. This is not intended for distance education, but to enhance the learning experience in the classroom. Schools in California, Wales, and universities like Case Western are already starting to experiment with using such devices in the classroom. If the tablette in the classroom becomes popular, it will place enormous pressure on R&E networks. Imagine hundreds of tablets in the schools trying to access the Internet at the same time! This is going to a whole different challenge then connecting up a few computers in a special laboratory or purpose built classroom. Most elementary schools have poor wireline connectivity and virtually no wireless access at all. Many colleges and even universities are in not much better shape.

Some network engineers fear that the biggest growth in data traffic will not only be from eScience but from thousands of schools which have given tablets to very student. As more and more textbooks are designed to be available only on tablets, we will soon reach a critical tipping point.

R&E networks need to start thinking of innovative solutions to address this potential new data torrent, of which 100% will be wireless. The SURFnet pilot with KPN to deploy an enterprise centric integrated LTE/Wifi connect on campuses connected to the SURFnet is a good example. http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/10/surfnet-and-kpn-to-collaborate-on-next.html

Slowly there is a growing realization that wireless data is going to require a completely different architecture than telcos have traditionally deployed for voice. It is déjà vu all over again. In the early days of the Internet, the telcos and the big equipment manufacturers tried to build data solutions around voice network architectures- and ultimately failed. Once again R&E networks can lead the way and deploy wireless data networks, as SURFnet is doing, that are designed first and foremost to carry Internet traffic.

Techniques like RF over glass, local caching, enterprise centric architectures, integrated Wifi/LTE, WDM-PON, RPON, 5G green networking, will need to be investigated, tested and deployed. Most schools will not have the wherewithal to manage these types of networks, so remote management will also be essential.

Here is a good pointer on how R&E optical networks can integrate with LTE/WiFi towers located at schools and universities. Radio- optical network backhauling
http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/blogs/techzine/2011/lightradio-baseband-processing-and-backhauling/

A small Quebec startup, Aeponyx, has also been active in this space. In Quebec, many municipalities own the telecom conduit, and as result this has allowed the creation of what are called “condominium” dark fiber suppliers. They are building very innovation “green” wireless technologies that all allow integrated LTE/Wifi delivered over optical networks using WDM-PON and a technology concept developed at CANARIE called Reverse Passive Optical Networking – RPON. The company is currently in financing mode, so I cannot reveal details of their technology. But if you have been following my blog, you will get a sense of where they are headed. For more information

Mr. François D. Ménard, CTO and Co-Founder
Contact Info: +1 819 609-1394
Email: francois.menard@aeponyx.com
Web site: www.aeponyx.com/portfolio.pdf

Finally community Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) like those deployed by UNINETT in Norway, Karen in New Zealand and BCnet in British Columbia will be also essential. When students take their tablets home they will want to have the same throughput and experience with their education material as they have had a school. Unfortunately most commercial last mile providers have poor connectivity and often “trombone” their traffic to distant exchange points. A local IXP will help reduce latency and congestion. -- BSA

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

My top 10 predictions for Internet and R&E networks for 2012

2011-12-12T17:44:00.000-08:00

[Well folks its that time of year again when self professed pundits make their various forecasts and projections on technology trends on the coming year.
I too shall join this unlikely parade, but with a glass of my favourite whisky in hand. Libations are essential to such a process - not so much in improving the clarity of my crystal ball, but removing any self doubt in the certainty of my forecasts.

A true test for any seer is to look back at past predictions to see how many came true. This can be a very humbling experience. My predictions for this past year can be found at (http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/12/my-top-10-predictions-for-internet-and.html) . Overall I scored 7 out of 10 on my predictions for last year. Not bad . It does help that I set the questions and I am judge and jury as whether my forecast was right or wrong. So under those circumstances a 7 out of 10 score may suggest that I am not quite ready to place bets on next year’s Oscar winners.

My predictions for last year:
1. Cisco enters the wireless arena – Score ½ point. Cisco has not made any major product announcements yet in the wireless field, but they continue to spend a lot of resources in the Wifi standards bodies to integrate Wifi wth 3G/4G
2. Google deploys national wireless 5G network – Score 0. I blew this one. Despite Google acquiring Motorola patents and significant growth of wireless services, Google has not proceeded to build a national wireless network
3. Commercial clouds for research take off – Score 1. Azure and Amazon are actively courting research community. Several R&E networks have announced cloud brokerage services
4. IPv6 growth still anemic despite Armageddon of IPv4 address shortage – Score 1. No surprise that nothing has changed here.
5. Green IT makes some headway in Europe and Quebec – Score 1. Quebec government through PROMPT has announced Green ICT $70m program and Europe has announced funding initiatives under the 7th framework
6. Major R&E data centers relocate to save on energy costs and added security – Score 1. Facebook have announced their data center in Northern Sweden and GreenQCloud in Iceland is starting to take off.
7. First 1000G wavelengths deployed – Score 0. Maybe next year
8. Twitter accelerates past Facebook- Score 1, because I hate Facebook. I am not interested in people’s personal lives. Just the facts mam’. Just the facts.
9. Network Neutrality still stalled because of actions of incumbents – Sadly score 1 here. Usage Based Billing and sordid list of other practices continue to bedevil the broadband market in North America.
10. R&E networks will evolve to become the National Public Internet – Score ½ here. The US UCAN initiative is a great example.

For 2012 I shall make the following bold predictions:
1. Amazon to commercialize follow the wind/follow the sun networking. Following the path of Greenstar as well as Hewlett Packard and AMD, Amazon will offer a service to move computing jobs between their various regions, as part of their spot market offering so that users can take advantage of lower energy and CO2 costs.

2. The “enterprise” centric cell phone network will start to be deployed at many universities. Carriers and equipment providers are starting to recognize that a cell phone network for data looks a lot different than one designed for voice. A lot of traffic can be cached locally and it makes a lot of sense to integrate Wifi with 3G/4G.The SURFnet/KPN trial at University of Utrecht is a good example of this type of architecture. See http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/10/surfnet-and-kpn-to-collaborate-on-next.html

3. Commercial clouds become a fertile ground for innovation for both universities and small businesses. Initiatives at JISC in the UK and Globus On live will create a wave of innovation at universities for a variety of new applications and services. Most of these will be deployed without the approval or knowledge of the central IT department. The cloud, like the PC did two decades ago , will free grad students and researchers to bypass the central IT department for their computing needs. See http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/11/forbes-cloud-computing-is-fueling-next.html. Universities also outsource many IT functions to R&E networks as in Australia

4. Software Defined Networks go mainstream on campus and R&E networks around the world. Over 10 years in gestation from original concepts such as UCLP and OpenFlow, universities and R&E networks will start to deploy SDN to allow greater control by the end user and to reduce costs of network equipment. See a wider role for R&E Networks in addressing innovation and the broadband competition gap http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/10/wider-role-for-national-research-and.html

5. Small Canadian mobile operators go bankrupt or get acquired by the big 3 carriers. History repeats itself again. And yet by the end of 2012 we will still not have a digital strategy in Canada or have opened the market to competition

6. DNS goes underground. Even if SOPA and Protect-IP are defeated this will not stop the copyright cartel from trying to use DNS as a tool to thwart fair use of music and films. See hide DNS requests from friends, foes and the feds http://dlvr.it/zBkp3 Alternate DNS under construction to counteract http://bit.ly/uFt9mx

7. Siri becomes a technology phenomena as Siri is used in all sorts of novel applications. See Aussie hacks Siri to automate home", with Arduino http://bit.ly/t0UuW4 /

8.Apple and/or Google deploy software SIMs and breaks up monopoly cell phone market to create new opportunities in M2M mobile market. See Ford has some problems with roaming in its #M2M solution. The answer is liberalization of the market and IMSI's for all http://bit.ly/sYx3sW

9. Telcos in countries that opted for structural separation become innovative and profitable. Telstra, Singtel, KPN, etc are discovering structural separation is a blessing. It frees their management from the monopoly rent mind set and now they can compete on services. Given their huge market visibility they quickly capture a large percentage of broadband market.

10. But elsewhere in the world, especially North America, consolidation in the broadband market continues with cable companies clearly becoming the big winners. Usage based billing rears its head once again to kill over the top competition. See will usage-based pricing kill the streaming video star?http://dlvr.it/yR762 New Research Report From Diffraction: Do data caps punish the wrong users? A bandwidth usage reality checkhttp://bit.ly/rWYvMJ via@AddThis

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

How clouds are transforming education, research and libraries

2011-12-09T02:50:00.001-08:00

[I recently the great pleasure of visiting JISC and JANET in the UK and was very impressed on their understanding of the potential of commercial clouds to radically transform education, research and libraries.
Clouds promise to unleash researchers, educators, administrators and librarians from the mundane tasks of administration and other services freeing them to focus on their core interests.

Clouds may also radically transform campus network architectures as they continue the trend of driving more and more traffic away from local servers to distant cloud providers. In fact some research and education networks are concerned that the next explosion in traffic will not be from higher education institutions, but from community colleges, further education and elementary schools. As these institutions look to replace textbooks with iPads and similar devices where all the education materials and library tools are located in the cloud, the need for high bandwidth fiber connectivity to every education institution will be critical.

For the research community exploding data volumes mean that data management activities often become all-consuming. It is this realization that recently led a number of researchers such as Ian Foster to launch Globus Online. It aims to provide complex and time-consuming research management processes via SaaS (Software as a Service) using commercial clouds. In the first phases of this project, it will be focused on relatively simple processes, like data movement. But the goal is to make the discovery potential of massive data, exponentially faster computers, and deep interdisciplinary collaboration accessible to every one of the million or more professional researchers worldwide not just a select few “big science” projects.

The Globus Online is particularly designed to address the needs of small science projects. It is believed that small science is where most scientists work and where the vast majority of discovery occurs, but it's an area that hasn't seen a lot of focus in terms of infrastructure software. It's also an area where big problems are emerging (because of the data deluge) and where the traditional big science approach (build a big team, construct a custom software solution) isn't feasible.

Big increases in data generated within research laboratories entail more demands for more careful data management. Researchers need not just data storage but full service data lifecycle management processes, encompassing data collection, storage, sharing, metadata, search, archiving, provenance, etc. Establishing and efficiently executing such processes would demand substantial time and resources that most researchers do not have, and cannot easily acquire. The Globus Online initiative proposes to outsource the entire lifecycle management process to a third party developed and operated by dedicated staff who are experts at performing relevant tasks reliably, securely, and at scale.

JISC is actually putting theory into practice by developing a number of cloud based tools for researchers as shown below.

But as Ian Foster points out, this move to clouds will also require a new third party delivery organizations to develop the common services for researchers, educators and librarians that will operate on commercial clouds. As you can see from the following pointers JISC is leading the world in developing these services using commercial cloud services brokered by JANET. And as noted in the JANET blog, I suspect that many commercial cloud services will provide their services for free, or almost free, to the research and education community. The value proposition of universities or colleges operating their own servers or clusters I think is going to rapidly disappear in the coming years.

Most importantly these cloud services will allow universities to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint by using zero carbon commercial cloud providers as recently demonstrated by SURFnet in their SURFnet 7 launch of connecting lightpaths from the Netherlands to GreenQcloud in Iceland. University and college computing facilities can represent anywhere from 15-40% all electricity consumption at a typical institution-–BSA]

SAVING LIBRARIES

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform32/SavingLibraries.html

The battle for time and resource
A new cloud-based service is set to transform the way libraries work, unleashing librarians from their admin burden to focus on services for students and researchers.
This cloud service is called the Shared Academic Knowledge Base plus, or KB+, and will be a database covering all ‘subscribed resources’ from a UK higher education perspective. That includes data such like publication information, holdings and rights, subscription management, organisations, licences and evidence such as usage statistics and financial data in an online catalogue across all UK academic libraries.
[..]
Showers is, however, adamant that “we are not developing a new electronic resource management system”; rather, the focus is on data and harnessing the community effort and work that happens at an institutional level. JISC aims to simplify the the challenge of collating accurate, quality and timely data across UK universities.
But there is also international interest in JISC’s work. Showers says, “A lot of what is done nationally could just as easily be done internationally, so we are working closely with partners like the Kuali Open Library environment project in the United States.”

Cloud Services for researchers
https://www.globusonline.org/inthenews/accelerating-discovery-by-outsourcing-the-mundane-an-interview-with-ian-foster/

Accelerating Data Intensive Science by Outsourcing the Mundane
http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/rpi-talk-foster-september-2011
JISC cloud services for researchers

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/umf.aspx

UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme
The £12.5 million UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme is part of a suite of activities under the University Modernisation Fund (UMF), a HEFCE fund that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better efficiency and value for money through the development of shared services.
This programme will invest up to £10 million to establish a shared infrastructure with suppliers brokered by JANET(UK) and support for research data management provided by DCC. The infrastructure will develop into a HE cloud and will support both research data management and enterprise application deployment. Up to a further £2.5 million will be used to develop shared services in administrative systems that support the delivery of learning, teaching, and research. Such shared services will allow universities and colleges to benefit from aggregated purchasing and reduced implementation and hosting costs, as well as through the streamlining of processes.
[…]
The HEFCE-funded UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme is managed by the JISC and will run from 1st February 2011 until 31st March 2012.
• These applications are designed to be delivered as SaaS from virtual servers within an institution or deployed on third party sites as is most cost effective and thus provide researchers with Cloud based tools to assist their work and help manage their data effectively. BRISSkit developed by Leicester University is designed to provide support for joint NHS and University research teams working with tissue samples and anonymised patient data. ViDaaS developed at Oxford is designed to provide Database as a Service to a wide range of Arts and Humanities researchers. Smart Research Framework (SRF) developed at Southampton will provide electronic lab data management and collaborations tools. Dataflow developed at Oxford provides an integrated set of tools to manage data within projects and then to store it for the longer term by simplifying the set up of Sword compliant data repositories and the submission of data to them. Each project will set up a website in the next few weeks and links will then be posted here.

Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

JANET UK brokerage
http://www.janetbrokerage.ac.uk/

[..]
We’re seeing a number of providers thinking about offering some element of their cloud service for free to the education sector, as well as highly secure government clouds starting to come online too. There’s a fair chance higher education institutions will want to take advantage of all of these offerings to one degree or another and if we do, the management of identity could frankly become a nightmare with multiple cloud providers in use simultaneously.
While there has been lots of talk about single sign on and other identity mechanisms. I think we may finally be at a tipping point, where this has to get solved due to the sheer weight of services involved - and about time too! I’m hopeful that the Moonshot project being investigated within Janet will provide some of the toolset to help answer this fundamental cloud issue.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Internet bigger than agriculture or energy sectors - importance of R&E networks

2011-12-08T03:50:00.001-08:00

[Several months ago McKinsey did a very interesting study on the economic value of the Internet.
They pointed out that Internet in the G8 countries as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden is now bigger than agriculture or energy. The Internet represents 3.4% of GDP and accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among these developed countries and as Vint Cerf pointed out in his blog created 2.6 jobs for every one lost.

It is interesting to note that many governments have a variety of research and financial support programs for agriculture, energy and other sectors, but they hardly spend any R&D money on the greatest job engine in the economy – the Internet. There are some funding programs and research initiatives in telecoms, computation and related fields. But R&D support for future Internet specifically is very small in comparison. Given the importance of the Internet to our future economy and job creation one would think governments should make more than a token investment in this field.

The future Internet spans a number of activities including pure research initiatives such as GENI and FIRE, to production facilities which involve deployment of working networks. The deployment of real working, next generation Internet networks with an early adopter community to my mind is probably the most important of all these activities. This is where National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) play a critical role.

This is how the early Internet started. In a landmark study undertaken by University of Toronto researchers showed that the adoption and growth of the commercial Internet was driven in early stages by recently graduated students who had been exposed to the benefits of the Internet at their respective universities and community colleges. “The (Teaching) Role of Universities in the Diffusion of the Internet” http://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/div/IKT04/Paper_Goldfarb.pdf

There are many viewpoints on what is the role and purpose of R&E networks. Some feel that they should be simple aggregators of traffic and deliver the lowest cost possible Internet service to the research and education community. Others believe that NRENS should focus on supporting eScience and the demands of big data flows from instruments and high performance computing. While others advocate that NRENs should be the backbone of all public sector service delivery such as education, healthcare and government services. While all these are very important roles for NRENs it is my belief these none of these roles should be considered an end objective in their own right. In my opinion, the most important role for NRENs is to lay down the foundation for development of the most important sector of the economy – the future Internet - by deploying advanced networks and services for the most demanding and largest early adopter community in the world – the research and education sector . Exposing researchers and most importantly, students to innovative applications, unconstrained bandwidth, new wireless services, open data, digital collections, federated identity, clouds, green IT, etc will give them the insight to take this experience to the outside world when they graduate.

The biggest transfer of knowledge between academia and society is not through science journals. Nor is it through patents or commercializing of academic research. The biggest transfer of knowledge between academia and industry and society occurs once a year at graduation. The future economy is increasingly going to based on Internet services applications in all sectors whether it is the resource, manufacturing or the service industries. Countries that expose students to the latest Internet innovation and who are comfortable in the collaborating and working in a future virtual world of the Internet will reap the rewards of a stronger economy and greater job growth.

--- BSA]

Internet matters: The Net's sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and prosperity
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Internet_matters#First

The Internet is a vast mosaic of economic activity, ranging from millions of daily online transactions and communications to smartphone downloads of TV shows. But little is known about how the web in its entirety contributes to global growth, productivity, and employment.
New McKinsey research into the Internet economies of the G-8 nations as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden finds that the web accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. Indeed, if measured as a sector, Internet-related consumption and expenditure is now bigger than agriculture or energy. On average, the Internet contributes 3.4 percent to GDP in the 13 countries covered by the research—an amount the size of Spain or Canada in terms of GDP, and growing at a faster rate than that of Brazil.

[…]
The Internet's impact on global growth is rising rapidly. The Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among the developed countries MGI studied, a sharp acceleration from the 10 percent contribution over 15 years. Most of the economic value created by the Internet falls outside of the technology sector, with 75 percent of the benefits captured by companies in more traditional industries. The Internet is also a catalyst for job creation. Among 4,800 small and medium-size enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology-related efficiencies.
[..]

Why data matters for public policy – Vint Cerf
http://policybythenumbers.blogspot.com/

As a computer scientist and engineer, I’ve always been fascinated by the process that determines how policies and institutions are created. Unlike computing systems, policymaking is anything but binary. An unpredictable combination of special interests, money, hot topics, loyalties and many other factors shape legislation that passes into law.

Now, more than ever, we need to use data to build sound policy frameworks that facilitate innovative breakthroughs. In order to inspire confidence in the future (and the markets), governments have to lead by using today’s facts to place big bets on—not against—a better tomorrow.

To get conversations rolling, Google’s public policy team will be sharing data insights here on this blog. We’ll also be inviting researchers, policymakers and thought leaders to contribute their interpretations of various data sets and what they mean for public policy. This forum will be open to ideas, and we welcome everyone to leave comments discussing their opinions.

Measurement and analysis provide the checks and balances we need to build a better future in the information age. When we don’t examine the numbers, policy is all too often created at the expense of the next generation. The Internet generates 2.6 jobs for every one lost, and today the world’s data is doubling every two years. We need to make sure that we sustain the laws that got us the open Internet we have today, and that sound policies are in place to keep this unparalleled engine of growth going.

Public discussions that are grounded in numbers reveal whether laws are effective and relevant or failing to protect citizens’ interests. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts; the facts speak for themselves and it is folly to ignore them. With this blog, we hope to spark policy debates, foster discussions among policymakers and constituents and help citizens exercise their right to hold governments accountable.

|

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Open Lightpath Exchanges, The Data Deluge, Software Defined R&E Networks

2011-12-04T13:23:00.001-08:00

[Several readers of this blog have pointed to the article in last week’s NYTimes on the genomics data deluge.
There is such a huge volume of genomics and bio-informatics data being produced that it cannot be transferred over commercial Internet networks, and instead organizations are using FedX and other sneaker nets to ship the data. The same crisis in data volumes is also occurring in the climate modeling and other fields as well.

Research and Education networks for many years have been warning about this coming data tsunami. For the most part they have the capacity and the tools to easily enable the transfer of these large data volumes. No commercial networks have this capability at this time. But the biggest problem is a lot of this data is not being generated by universities or R&E organizations but commercial facilities closely aligned with the R&E community. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to as they have found life sciences a fertile market for products that handle large amounts of information.

This poses a real dilemma for many R&E network, especially those who receive public funding. They cannot be seen to competing with the private sector (even though commercial networks do not yet have the capability or technology to deliver such data volumes), and in many cases their stated public policies do not allow then to connect commercial facilities. Compounding this problem is that most of the modern computational tools needed to analyze this data are only available on commercial clouds. Academic HPC facilities and university based cloud solutions generally cannot scale as quickly as commercial cloud providers in providing as many cores as required on demand to analyze this data. As well many grad students and many small innovative business are developing the necessary analysis tools to work only on the commercial clouds, as they are driven by the revenue opportunity of “click compute” models offered by many commercial cloud providers.

R&E networks are thus conflicted. Academic institutions and commercial organizations need access to commercial clouds to analyze this torrent of data – yet their acceptable use policy may prohibit the interconnection to commercial facilities, especially if the other end of the connection is also a commercial organization. This is where Open Lightpath Exchanges can play a critical role, much like the earlier NAPs played in the early day of the commercialization of the Internet.

Open LightPath Exchanges, by their very definition are policy free. That means anyone can cross connect to anyone else regardless whether they are commercial organizations or academic institutions. Open LightPath Exchanges are being established all around the world and many more are expected to be deployed in the coming year. A good background paper on Open LightPath Exchanges “Open Exchanges for Open Science” can be found at: http://www.glif.is/publications/papers/20110519BStA_Open_Exchanges.pdf

Open Lightpath Exchanges allow commercial organizations, who benefit from R&E data, to bring their own fiber to the exchange point so that they can interconnect to R&E networks and commercial clouds. Many R&E networks also connect to commercial clouds through Open LightPath Exchange Points. But what if you are not located near a city that hosts an Open LightPath Exchange? Several R&E networks offer what are called “Distributed” Open Lightpath Exchange points – but these facilities are often restricted to academic institutions. This is where Software Defined Networks can help as they allow the deployment of “condominium” optical networks that allow both commercial and academic institutions to share the same fiber or lightpath, and yet not have policy of funding conflicts in terms of use of the fiber.

The CANARIE/CRC User Controlled Lightpths (UCLP) was one of the first to develop such technology to enable the deployment of condominium lightpaths, where each organization can independently manage their own set of lightpaths, with independent use policies, on a common fiber or optical infrastructure. Internet 2 and National Lambda Rail are now making significant strides in this field as well as other research initiatives such as the ORCA experiment described below. Now that NLR has been re-energized by Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong acquisition, to drive a national bio-informatics strategy I think we will see a huge push to integrate Open Lightpath Exchanges with Software Defined Networks. Some pointers follow – BSA]

DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/business/dna-sequencing-caught-in-deluge-of-data.html?_r=2

RENCI to Demonstrate On-Demand Resources and Provisioning at SC11

http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/hpccloud/2011-11-02/renci_to_demonstrate_on-demand_resources_and_provisioning_at_sc11.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

Scientists studying data or compute-intensive problems require high bandwidth and computational resources, often from heterogeneous systems at different sites.
[…]
ORCA was developed by Duke computer science professor Jeff Chase and his students with funding from the National Science Foundation. It is one of the experimental control frameworks for the NSF's Global Environments for Network Innovation (GENI) project. GENI is a virtual laboratory for networking experiments that will help researchers develop the tools and protocols that will define future internets. With funding from the Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and the NSF Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure program, researchers are adapting ORCA as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for serving the diverse needs of computational scientists.
The first demonstration will execute a scientific workflow by using ORCA to allocate a slice of computational resources from multiple cloud providers and bandwidth-provisioned network connections between provider sites. The workflow, managed by the Pegasus workflow management system, will use six serial applications, which will run on Condor clusters dynamically provisioned from clouds owned by RENCI in Chapel Hill, NC, and by Duke University in Durham, NC. The two clouds are connected by the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), an experimental network that connects RENCI and its partner institutions at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.
[..]
A related demonstration will use the ORCA framework to execute a Hadoop workflow on multiple clouds connected through bandwidth-provisioned network pipelines. Hadoop is a software framework for data-intensive distributed applications. A third demonstration will take a closer look at a part of the first demonstration: the on-demand provisioning of computational infrastructure to stand up a Condor cluster in a networked cloud environment.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Named Data Networking - how LTE networks will soon be extension of enterprise WiFi

2011-11-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

[It amazes me how still many people think that the Internet network architecture is a variant of the telephone system.
Although the Internet was originally conceived as an “end-to-end” network, most traffic today on the Internet rarely goes end to end and instead is sourced locally from a content delivery network or cloud. With the deployment of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and content peering, most ISPs can offload 40-60% of their Internet traffic at the IXP. Some R&E networks have reported off loading up to 90% of their traffic through these types of arrangements. With the advent of clouds and ubiquitous wireless access soon most Internet traffic will be terminating locally, as opposed to end-to-end connections.

In recognition of that trend, several years ago, the famous Internet pioneer Van Jacobson developed the concept of what is now called “Named Data Networking (NDN)” – which in effect is attempting to re-architect the Internet and develop an open standard for content distribution. It is hoped that NDN will become the standard for content distribution and the Internet much like TCP/IP displaced many proprietary network protocols in its day such as DECnet, BITnet, etc. See below. I have also bogged about these developments and have also written a white paper on the subject. See my previous blog from yesterday (http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/11/oecd-report-internet-traffic-exchange.html).

Currently most mobile telcom operators are still trapped in the old mindset of building wireless networks that enable “end-to-end” telephone calls. But as the data tsunami overwhelms their networks they are now starting to develop new strategies. Many now are attempting to use Wifi offload to remove some of the large data volumes off their 3G/4G networks. But as the data volume grows, some organizations are realizing that the network will also have to evolve like the wireline Internet networks did towards an IXP, enterprise, content peering architecture i.e Named Data Networking.

Rather than WiFi being a poor cousin to the primary 3G/LTE network, instead the 3G/LTE network will be a back up to ubiquitous enterprise WiFi. An example of this type of strategic thinking is the recent LTE/Wifi project announced by SURFnet in partnership with KPN (http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/10/surfnet-and-kpn-to-collaborate-on-next.html). This is another reason why deployment of IXPs deep into the community is critical as they greatly enhance wireless performance.

Even large circuit-switched optical networks are moving in this direction. LHCONE is the quintessential example of large set of international optical networks to distribute data “end-to end” from CERN to computer databases located at universities around the world. But as researchers move to clouds and HPC clouds, the need for end-to-end circuits will largely disappear. Instead the researcher will move data within the cloud from storage to computation to visualization and then send the results wirelessly to their iPad or iPhone . This wont obviate the need for optical circuits because data will still need to be transferred from CERN to the cloud. Optical Internet Exchanges, on the other hand, like IXPs will be critical for transfer of data to and from the cloud. – BSA]

Named Data Networking
http://www.named-data.net/
While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today's focus on where -- addresses and hosts -- to what -- the content that users and applications care about….
------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

OECD report: Internet Traffic Exchange Points

2011-11-07T04:59:00.000-08:00

[Here is an excellent report on IXPs recently released by the OECD.
One of the newsworthy highlights is the dramatic reduction in telecommunication costs due to an open competitive market in the Internet versus the still largely monopolistic telco/cableco markets. It is interesting to note that Internet costs continue to drop while the monopolistic last mile broadband market rises. Competition works – and this is ample evidence why governments and regulators need to break open last mile market to competition through structural separation or investing in the underlying infrastructure as in Australia or Singapore.
It is good to see the OECD recognize the importance of IXPs as one of the linchpins of the Internet economy. I have long argued that IXPs are going to play an increasing important role in the future of the Internet. See my paper on this subject (http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/02/personal-perspective-on-evolving.html). On some networks 90% of the Internet traffic is sourced across IXPs via settlement free content peering. IXPs deep into the community will be critically more important with 4G and 5G networks , as proximity to an IXP significantly affects Internet performance and throughput on wireless networks. See article below on how content networks face ‘hyperconnected’ world of devices.

I believe that R&E networks and other organizations such as registries can play a critical role in ensuring the deeper deployment of IXPs especially in communities where there is little business case for a commercial operation. IXPs quickly become a nucleus point for small business and other commercial activities within a community, and this is how R&E networks can play such an important role. R&E networks in New Zealand, Norway and British Columbia are good examples in this regard by building transit or internet exchange points in communities through the regions they serve. The Brazil IXP community, as discussed in the OECD paper is also another good example to look at.

Some excerpts from the OECD paper – BSA]

INTERNET TRAFFIC EXCHANGE: MARKET DEVELOPMENTS AND POLICY CHALLENGES
http://www.internetac.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/DSTI_ICCP_CISP20112_REV1.pdf

The reasons behind the very good performance of the Internet market model of traffic exchange are explored in the section entitled “Why Has the Internet Market Performed So Well?” in the Annex to
this Report. The contrast between the results observed in the Internet market and comparable markets for exchange of traditional circuit-switched voice (time-domain multiplexed, or TDM) traffic is striking. For example, Internet transit service provides what is effectively, in TDM terms, global transport and termination. The price of USD 2 to USD 3 per megabit per month therefore includes a traffic-weighted average of transport costs to all the possible destinations in the world, as well as the costs of terminating on
local access networks in each country. Stated in terms of an equivalent per-minute price for delivery of voice traffic, this is less than USD 0.0000008, five orders of magnitude less than wholesale rates for services providing comparable functions in TDM markets. The reasons for this performance include the efficiency of packet-switched technology, competition in Internet markets, and the flexibility of routing arrangements among IP networks. The market has also benefitted from the policy environment, in which
governments have refrained, in most OECD countries, from regulation of the market for IP traffic exchange.

A survey of 142,000 peering agreements conducted for this report shows that the terms and conditions of the Internet interconnection model are so generally agreed upon that 99.5% of interconnection agreements are concluded without a written contract. That these “rules of the game” are so ubiquitous and serviceable indicates a degree of public unanimity that an external regulator would be hardpressed to create. The parties to these agreements include not only Internet backbone, access, and content distribution networks, but also universities, NGOs, branches of government, individuals, businesses and enterprises of all sorts—a universality of the constituents of the Internet that extends far beyond the reach
of any regulatory body’s influence.
New categories of participants have invested to improve quality and create new alternatives to transit. These include self-supply by online service and content providers such as Google, as well
as intermediary content delivery network (CDN) service providers such as Akamai and Limelight. CDN services have supported, and have grown in parallel with, the growing demand for applications such as video streaming and download. Taken together, many of the structural changes summarized here -- reduced reliance on transit, local availability of IXPs, direct delivery of traffic by CDNs, and caching of content closer to the user -- have all contributed to make routing more direct, reduce latency, and improve quality.
These developments have made the structure of the Internet flatter and broader, and reduced its dependence on any one player or group. Today, only a small percentage of the traffic on the Internet ever touches any of the old backbone networks. Google is now ranked third among networks in global traffic carried, behind only Level 3 and Global Crossing, and it’s notable that each of these largest networks are born of the Internet era, rather than evolved from incumbent TDM predecessors. In general, the growth of the Internet over the past five years has increased the effectiveness of competition in the market for Internet traffic exchange.

The growth of the Internet market in Latin America in the past five years has been dramatic, led by the success of a long-term program of new exchange point development by “Comitê Gestor da Internet
no Brasil” (CGI), the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, a public-private partnership funded in large measure by revenue from domain name registrations within the .BR country-code top-level domain.
Between 2006 and 2011, Brazil has grown from four IXPs to nineteen, maintaining their position of leadership in the region; in addition to having the region’s largest exchange, in São Paulo, Brazil has hosted more than half of Latin America’s IXPs for most of the history of the Internet’s expansion in the region. Brazil’s success has been a product of several factors coinciding: the CGI takes the long view, with a consistent program of economic development, rather than short-term one-off projects. Their IXPs are among only a handful in the world that are the product of a considered and intentional economic model. Before beginning, they made a careful investigation of CityLink, the New Zealand IXP system, and of the
SeattleIX, including site visits, observation of the annual governance meeting, and interviews with the founders, board of directors, and Internet exchange participants. This feedback loop has continued to the present day, with CGI management staff and board members actively investigating the successes and
failure of other IXPs and participating in the international IXP operations community.

Akamai, CDNs face ‘hyperconnected’ world of devices

http://gigaom.com/cloud/akamai-cdns-face-hyperconnected-world-of-devices/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom
[…]
Device proliferation will only continue. In an era of “hyperconnected devices, any device that can be connected is connected,” said Akamai chief scientist Tom Leighton. Five years ago, Akamai delivered 3TB of mobile data per day, that number rose to 520TB per day this year, and is projected to hit 91,000TB (or 91 petabytes) per day by 2016.
Akamai and smaller CDN competitors like Limelight and Edgecast are scrambling to meet the demand for a great mobile computing experience. The scary thing is that smartphones and tablets are just the beginning. More non-PC devices including household appliances,even garments, will be part of the data scrum going forward. That means more data flowing from more types of devices with all sorts of form factors.
“These devices may be on Ethernet or WiFi or 3G or 4G. [They will be] Refrigerators other appliances. That’s a new challenge for [network] performance,” said Ravi Maira,VP of site acceleration for Akamai.
[..]
------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Forbes: Cloud Computing is Fueling the Next Startup Boom - role of funding councils and R&E networks

2011-11-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

[Here is a great article from Forbes on how cloud computing is fueling the next startup boom.
It is not only the private sector that is creating new opportunities in this field, but funding councils and R&E networks are also playing a critical role in the transformation of the future computing. The recent announcements by Internet 2, SURFnet, JISC/JANET, etc to broker commercial cloud services for researchers are great examples of this trend.

In this era of fiscal constraints many funding councils are looking for industry “partnerships”, rather than simple “partners” in order to accelerate commercialization of academic research. Moving research computing to commercial clouds will enable an entire new eco-system of industry and research applications and tools. A good example is Galaxy (http://wiki.g2.bx.psu.edu/Admin/Cloud), which is taking the genomics and bio-informatics research community by storm. Researchers are voting with their feet (and wallets) to use these commercial cloud applications because of their ease of use, simplicity, ability to scale quickly, no need for upfront capital costs for computing and no bureaucratic hassles to access university computing resources. As well, young entrepreneurial graduate students, who are fueling the startup boom are discovering that clouds are a great revenue opportunity through click compute initiatives that earn them an ongoing revenue stream every time someone uses their application on a commercial cloud.

Moving research computing to commercial clouds can easily pay for themselves in energy savings alone. Up to 80% of operating a research computer is in its energy consumption according to a recent study (Belady, C., “In the Data Center, Power and Cooling Costs More than IT Equipment it Supports). If the commercial cloud infrastructure uses clean renewable energy, then cloud computing can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of research computing as well.

Most HPC computing at universities is now built around clusters and it estimated that of 50-80% of the applications that run on these computers are loosely coupled and therefore could easily be transferred to the commercial cloud. For those who want to see rapid commercialization of academic research, the time to move to commercial clouds is now.

Some excerpts from the Forbes article—BSA]

With all the gloomy economic headlines in recent months, one can be forgiven for thinking we’re in a hopeless economic morass. But if you look beneath the surface of today’s technology shifts, you may also see potential for one of the biggest economic booms in a generation. How so?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2011/11/01/cloud-computing-is-fuel-for-the-next-entrepreneurial-boom/2/

As with all other economic booms, this boom will arise from the spunk and innovation of an emerging class of entrepreneurs, many being young and just out of (or still in) college, and others being veterans of workforce experiences relatively void of opportunities. In this next boom, another thing will be different as well – today’s entrepreneurs have an incredible resource available at their fingertips at minimal cost – cloud computing.
Unemployment is high right now, and there are many, many, many professionals who see the startup route as a more sustainable alternative to seeking full-time employment. There is now an incredible abundance of resources available on demand, for little upfront cost, to businesses.
I’m not just referring to companies that are offering cloud services – rather, companies of all types can now be created and supported. I’m talking about law firms, travel services, insurance brokerages, scientific ventures, entertainment sites and just about everything you can imagine. I’m also talking about groups or departments within existing large organizations, as well as individuals working out of home offices.
Last week, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman made an interestingobservation about the prospects for our economy going forward: cloud computing is driving new growth and opportunities. He quotes Jeff Weiner, CEO. of LinkedIn, who observed that cloud “makes it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone anywhere to be an entrepreneur and to have access to all the best infrastructure of innovation. And despite all of our challenges, it is happening here in America.” Previously, Friedman referred to this as the “DIY economy.”
There was a time when launching a serious startup required serious capital. Seed money was required for hiring talent, marketing and promotion, office space, and for technology to make it all happen. The technology portion of the equation is suddenly diminishing, dramatically. Thanks to cloud computing and social networking resources, it now costs virtually pennies to secure and get the infrastructure needed up and running to get a new venture off the ground.
One relatively recent survey of 550 startups from BestVendor found a majority use cloud-based resources: QuickBooks (71%) for accounting, Google Analytics (70%) for BI, Salesforce.com (59%) for customer relationship management, and Dropbox (39%) for storage and backup. A few months back, there was a report about 280 North Inc., a San Francisco-based startup which produces presentation and Web development software. The founders said they incurred initial monthly expenses of about $4,500 a month by using code available free on the Web and renting storage from Amazon Web Services. As Chris Sacca, a 280 North investor and former Google Inc. executive, put it: “The biggest line item in these companies now is rent and food… A decade ago, I don’t think you could write a line of code for less than $1 million.”
Let me emphasize here that we’re talking about startups. The value proposition of the cloud is compelling for the first two or three years, then begin to catch up to on-premises IT costs. And there are small firms thatprefer to build and manage their own IT from the get-go. But it’s at that initial startup phase that cloud lowers the barrier to entry for many innovators. Acompilation of cloud computing stats by O’Reilly Media shows that companies can save up to 30% in IT costs over a three-year period employing cloud resources versus on-premises equipment. A relatively small operation with two application servers and two database servers could expect to pay about $106,000 over a three-year period, versus $149,000 for internal IT. For the first year, the capital requirements for a small server operation are near zero with cloud, versus $40,000 and up for standard on premises software and servers.
To get an in-the-trenches perspective, I asked Jason Stowe, founder and CEO of Cycle Computing, about his experiences as an entrepreneur who built his business on the cloud and offers the chance for others to do the same. Cycle delivers high-bandwidth supercomputer capabilities to scientific, engineering and technical firms — many of which are startups. “Any size organization can now tap into supercomputing power, from big companies to start-ups to individual researchers,” he says. He even coined a term for what his firm is offering: “utility supercomputing.” Essentially, thanks to cloud, Cycle can make supercomputing power available to the masses.
And lots of startups and small businesses are taking advantage of this relatively new cloud resource. Stowe gives examples: a chip design firm runs simulations of its digital circuits on his firm’s CycleCloud clusters. Researchers at a bioinformatics start-up use Cycle’s cloud to index and query genomics data to help fight disease. A young, up-and-coming scientific instrument company uses Cycle’s clusters to process the high volume of data that comes off their products.
“In these cases, start-ups can focus on their core-competency while still accessing a supercomputer that only Fortune 100s could build and operate before,” says Stowe. Many of the startups he works with would not have been able to get off the ground without cloud offerings such as that Cycle is offering. “Science-heavy start-ups would require much larger capital investments to get off the ground if they didn’t take advantage of cloud and utility supercomputing offerings,” says Stowe. “For example, 30,000-core cluster for top-five pharma would have cost $5 to $10 million and about six months to build.” With Cycle’s cloud offering, the project took eight hours to implement, at a cost of about $10,000.
Oh, and by the way, Cycle Computing itself is built on the cloud. “Cycle itself owns no servers,” Stowe says. He started the company in 2005 with no investors and $8,000 in capital — a real bootstrap story. “Thanks to the cloud we can test our utility supercomputing software at the scales our clients use, with minimal cost.”
If companies such as Cycle Computing are any indication, and with a confluence of underutilized skills and cheap online resources, we may be on the verge of an explosion in entrepreneurial activity in the decade ahead that will rival anything we’ve seen before. The barriers to entry have been significantly lowered.

A wider role for National Research and Education Networks?

2011-10-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

[Here is a great blog on a topic dear to my heart that I have been blogging about for some time. National R&E networks I believe can play an important role through disruptive innovation in a number of ways:

(a) addressing the larger broadband environment of usage based billing and other Internet traffic management practices
(b) enabling community broadband networks through deployment of transit exchanges, peering and other services
(c) developing new enterprise centric wireless mobile business models through integrated Wifi and LTE
(d) reducing or eliminating the carbon footprint of computing and networking through use of green clouds and networks
(e) developing collaborative tools and platforms
(f) etc
--Thanks to Jon Hunt for this pointer]

A wider role for National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)?: A new working ... http://bit.ly/uhWAdw
A new working group paper on broadband and science from the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Digital Development sets out the importance of national research and education networks (NRENs), in the wider context of broadband's role in supporting science and education communities.
Recommendations specific to NRENs include:
• Research and Education Networks (RENs), the bodies set up in most countries – including developing countries – to manage and maintain e-Infrastructures, should be given high political visibility towards governments, regulators and academia given their role in the transformation of developing economies into knowledge societies.
• National authorities and the relevant international organizations should promote affordable and fair access to broadband e-infrastructures via the establishment and consolidation of national, regional and global RENs, fostering cooperative environments that bridge the Digital Divide (non-connected countries and regions) and the Geographical Divide (disadvantaged non-central areas).
• RENs should spearhead technological and service innovation in partnership with industry.
• Broadband e-Infrastructures should be leveraged for public service, fostering the engagement of RENs in other public sectors such as e-Health, e-Government, e-Learning, e-Innovation and "e-Capacity Building".
The report positions NRENs as having a much broader focus than their traditional role of supporting the higher education and research community. In the UK, this is borne out in the way the JANET network has extended its reach significantly in recent years, through, for example, the provision services to schools via local authorities and regional broadband consortia, as well as engagement with the Cabinet Office Public Services Network (PSN) programme. See thispresentation from a recent JANET Strategic Briefing Day for more on this.
Examples from the USA also exemplify this transition. The United States Unified Community Anchor Network (USUCAN) project aims to "provide community anchor institutions including public safety organizations, public libraries, K-12 schools, community colleges, research parks, and health care organizations with advanced broadband capabilities and services." The initiative utilises the capabilities and reach of the Internet2 national research and education network:
"The U.S. UCAN project was established under the auspices of a federal stimulus grant to Internet2 from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). Using this stimulus funding, Internet2 is acquiring more than 10,000 miles of fibre optic cable and will build a new nationwide network infrastructure with an unprecedented 8.8 Terabits of capacity using emerging 100 Gigabit per second technology. This new infrastructure will serve as the underlying infrastructure for U.S. UCAN to offer its services to community anchor institutions nationwide. The new network which will be built through strong public-private partnerships, intends to complement and link together new regional community anchor networks created through BTOP funding as well as Internet2’s existing regional network members and network connectors. The goal is to provide the high performance national networking capable of fully supporting all 200,000 community anchor institutions across the U.S. - three times as many institutions as the Internet2 Network serves today."
An ambition very much in keeping with the recommendations set out in the Broadband Commission's working paper, extending the reach and benefits of an existing NREN to a much wider community. Another US project of note is theGig.U initiative, which comprises "a broad-based group of over 30 leading research universities from across the United States...Gig.U seeks to accelerate the deployment of ultra high-speed networks to leading U.S. universities and their surrounding communities." The project issued a request for information (RFI) in September 2011 which set out four goals as the first step towards Gig.U delivering its mission:
• Promote the deployment of next generation networks across member communities to stimulate economic development;
• Identify creative approaches to design, operate and finance self-sustaining next generation networks for member communities while evaluating the trade-offs between these different approaches;
• Gain an understanding of how differences between member communities influence the level of private sector interest in working with any individual community; and
• Consider ways in which multiple Project communities can work together beyond the RFI process to improve the private sector business case for next generation networks.
Again, lots in common with the Broadband Commission's recommendations in the above. An FAQ response sets out how the project relates to existing US research and education networks:
"The Project is focused on providing broader community connectivity to the member universities and communities. The existing R&E networks provide significant institutional connectivity to all of the member universities. This effort will neither duplicate nor compete with those networks. Rather, the Project will work with the R&E community and others with network facilities in the university communities, to develop new approaches to extending and upgrading existing network assets with a focus on higher speed retail offerings to places on campus that are not served by the existing R&E networks and to the areas surrounding the campuses. This will enable those who work with ultra-high speed networks on campus to be able to continue their work while home and create laboratories of greater connectivity throughout the university and surrounding community."
A slightly different kind of cross-fertilisation than that being undertaken by USUCAN perhaps, but very interesting nevertheless.
Of related interest are gigabit projects like Gig.U participant Case Western Reserve University's Case Connection Zoneinitiative, Chattanooga's city-wide municipally-owned fiber-to-the-premises network delivering 1Gbps services as well as Google's fibre initiative in Kansas City (some interesting ideas already here), all of which are test-beds and trail-blazers for exploring the capabilities and possibilities of high bandwidth services. More on these in my next post.
------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

SURFnet and KPN to collaborate on next generation mobile networks, Internet and IPv6

2011-10-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

[Kudos to SURFnet on an exciting new initiative between SURFnet and KPN (Dutch incumbent telephone company).
As many of you know I have been blogging about this opportunity for R&E networks for some time. I think R&E networks can play an important leadership role in deploying revolutionary next generation mobile networks with an “enterprise” centric architecture, integrating campus Wifi, powered by renewable energy, built around native IPv6, eduroam authentication and using the R&E network for backhaul. See my various blogs on “5G” networking—BSA]

http://www.surfnet.nl/en/nieuws/Pages/testenvironment.aspx

Test environment for super-fast mobile Internet in higher education and research

KPN and SURFnet concluded an agreement today to collaborate on studying closer integration between mobile networks and the Internet and on introducing the latest generation of Internet addresses, IPv6.
Utrecht, The Netherlands, 21 October 2011 – KPN and SURFnet concluded an agreement today to collaborate on studying closer integration between mobile networks and the Internet and on introducing the latest generation of Internet addresses, IPv6.

Their joint aim is to build knowledge and gain experience working with new “fourth generation” (4G) mobile networks. They also want to give an extra push to the introduction of the new generation of Internet addresses (IPv6) in the Netherlands.

Mobile networks
Mobile communication is playing an increasingly important role in the higher education and research sector. Unrestricted, fast, uninterrupted access to the Internet is hugely important in new approaches to working and learning. SURFnet and KPN intend to explore how wireless networks such as UMTS, Wi-Fi and the new LTE can be more closely integrated into the SURFnet network and, as a result, the Internet. The first pilot project will be launched before the end of this year. The project will involve linking KPN's mobile broadband infrastructure as smoothly as possible to SURFnet’s network infrastructure and to the Wi-Fi networks of the participating universities based on eduroam authentication. According to SURFnet and KPN, the project will allow them to gain the knowledge and experience that they need to use new mobile networks in education and research.

Both parties believe in the advantages of new approaches to working and learning, with students and researchers being free to learn and collaborate anytime and anywhere. Mobile networks can support these new approaches by giving students and staff at Dutch institutions for higher education and research easy, secure, and reliable access to modern ICT applications. Major advances are now possible thanks to the new LTE network, which offers high-speed capability and shorter log on time. SURFnet’s user group has demonstrated that it can play a pioneering role when it comes to the introduction of new network services; the best-known example of this is the Internet itself.

IPv6 – the latest generation of Internet addresses
SURFnet has long been encouraging knowledge institutions in the Netherlands and elsewhere to use IPv6. The SURFnet network has supported IPv6 since 2001, but many institutions and companies have yet to make the switch. The transition to IPv6 has now become an urgent matter, however, because the available IPv4 addresses are almost exhausted. SURFnet and KPN therefore wish to accelerate implementation of IPv6. To help KPN make a rapid and effective transition to IPv6, SURFnet – working through the RIPE Network Coordination Centre – will transfer a series of IPv4 addresses to KPN in order to stimulate the crucial timely introduction of IPv6 in the Netherlands.
The results of the study will be available for general use.
----
About SURFnet
SURFnet ensures that researchers, instructors, and students can work together simply and effectively with the aid of ICT. SURFnet therefore promotes, develops, and operates a hybrid network, a trusted identity, and a pioneering collaboration environment that encourages online collaboration. About one million users within the target group have access to these services. SURFnet is part of SURF, in which Dutch research universities, universities of applied sciences, and research centres collaborate on creating innovative ICT facilities. For more than 20 years now, SURFnet has been one of the primary authorities in the Netherlands in the field of Internet communication.

Company profile KPN
KPN is the leading telecommunications and ICT service provider in the Netherlands, offering wireline and wireless telephony, internet and TV to consumers and end-to-end telecom and ICT services to business customers. KPN operates a global ICT services company with the brand name Getronics and has a market leading position in the Benelux, offering end-to-end solutions in infrastructure and network-related IT. KPN manages 2.2 million workspaces. In Germany and Belgium, KPN pursues a Challenger strategy in its wireless operations and holds number three market positions through E-Plus and BASE. In Spain and France, KPN offers wireless services as an MVNO through its own brands and through partner brands. KPN provides wholesale network services to third parties and operates an efficient IP-based infrastructure with global scale in international wholesale through iBasis.
At December 31st, 2010, KPN served over 42.2 million customers, of which 33.9 million were in wireless services, 4.4 million in wireline voice, 2.8 million in broadband Internet and 1.2 million in TV. With 19,192 FTEs in the Netherlands (30,599 FTEs for the whole group), KPN reported full-year revenues of EUR 13.4bn and an EBITDA of EUR 5.5bn in 2010. KPN was incorporated in 1989 and is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

The role and purpose of R&E networks

2011-10-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

[Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, recently received the GEANT Expert group report with its views on the future of the pan-European research and education networking.
This is an excellent report and I concur with most of its recommendations, particularly that R&E networks should be engines of innovation. R&E networks whose only goal is to provide low cost network and Internet services and who look and act no differently then hierarchical, monopoly telcos are ultimately doomed in my opinion. Someday, when governments break up the existing telecom oligopolies, the cost of telecom circuits will drop dramatically and R&E networks will be unable to compete. We are already seeing this phenomena on some competitive cross sections in Europe where optical lighpaths from the commercial sector are considerably cheaper than similar links offered by R&E networks.

R&E networks have had their greatest success and biggest impact when, in addition to delivering services to the R&E community they also engage in disruptive innovation. The deployment of the Internet itself is probably the quintessential example. But the invention of the web, customer owned fiber, IP over optical, Eduroam, etc are other examples of technologies that have emanated from R&E networks and have gone onto transform society and create entire new business eco-systems. Open lightpath exchanges, federated optical networks, enterprise based integrated WiFi broadband wireless networks, brokered commercial cloud services, user controlled or software defined networks, federated identity, collaboration tools, leveraging build out of community based broadband networks (Gig.u) , green IT, etc are other ongoing examples of how R&E networks can continue to engage in disruptive innovation. Eventually these technologies will also transform society and create new business opportunities.

The only exception I would make to this otherwise excellent report is engagement with industry. While I fully applaud and commend engagement with industry, as for example, brokering commercial cloud services, the exception I make is engagement with monopoly telecoms. Unfortunately most politicians and bureaucrats associate telecoms as part and parcel of the ICT industry. What distinguishes telecom from the rest of the ICT sector is they make most of their money from monopoly rent extraction rather than innovation. In many cases the innovation undertaken by R&E networks is a threat to their livelihood. So extreme caution is warranted when R&E networks are asked to engage with their local monopoly telco/cableco/cellco. Some excerpts from the report—BSA]

Knowledge without Borders
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/docs/geg-report.pdf

A platform for innovation: A much stronger orientation towards innovation is required, building on the networks’ unique, but underutilized, position within the European innovation ecosystem. Innovation here means not just (or even primarily) technological innovation but also in the use of technology and in the provision of services. NRENs should become living labs, providing live testbeds for future technologies and connecting researchers and others to the market. No commercial provider has this capability and it is a further demonstration of GÉANT’s European scale.

Organize for innovation. To realise this goal, innovation has to be made a central focus of networking activities, and supported/reinforced through appropriate structures and funding. Greater inclusiveness and transparency must be introduced, opening these activities up to industry, academia and user communities.
The nature of the scientific process is changing fundamentally, with research becoming more interdisciplinary and data driven. Big Science projects, which were once confined to a few communities such as high-energy physics, are now found in virtually every scientific discipline, including social sciences. Such projects routinely present the most challenging requirements for the research networks. Scientists rely increasingly on trustworthy networks to navigate the complex web of people, data and resources.

Provide a research partner and lead customer for the European ICT industry. NRENs should play a key role in mediating between the higher education sector and its suppliers in the provision of commercial networking services, including cloud services.

Increasing competition for international connectivity: The fact that many of the NRENs’ international links are provided outside of the GÉANT/GN3 framework makes for a very dynamic situation. High-end user communities exploit this dynamism to create their own global networks (e.g. for the data produced by the LHC accelerator at CERN). Effectively, there is no monopoly for international connectivity, nor should there be.

We envisage moving towards a richer mesh of networks based on ubiquitous virtualized resources. These mobile multi-cloud environments, where there is storage on every device, are much closer
to the multi-domain nature of academic networking. Academic data centres will consolidate and reliance on global data centres will increase. New virtualized software-based approaches are arriving on the scene and more will come before 2020.

Allow for flexibility in architectural choices and operational modes, recognising the increasing diversity of solutions available. Networking technology continues to evolve rapidly; witness for instance
the emergence of hybrid networking architectures, light path connectivity and Open Exchanges. Even if no major breakthroughs would occur in a 2020 timeframe, current technologies will continue to push the boundaries in terms of performance. Smart resource sharing, virtualization, ubiquity, mobility, security will all be in demand by the networks’ disparate users. From an architectural point of view, there are several ways in which the networks might be configured; indeed, a key characteristic is the increasing diversity of solutions available. The Future Internet is expected to be a complex federated architecture, providing multiple services tailored to co-existing, yet securely independent user communities. GÉANT has to grow as a European commons in an inherently multi-domain, open environment. The guiding principles should be (1) what works best for users and meets their requirements, (2) what contributes to the European communications commons, and (3) what gives Europe the best position in global research and education networking.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

How university IT departments can make money selling spare compute cycles through SpotCloud

2011-10-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

[A very innovative Canadian startup called Enomaly is offering a service called SpotCloud that allows IT departments to sell spare compute cycles into the global cloud market.
This service has been featured in the Economist magazine and other media outlets. Spotcloud may be an ideal opportunity for university IT departments and research groups to earn a little additional money and familiarize themselves with the advantages of commercial cloud services. Already university consortia in the US and elsewhere are exploring using the SpotCloud service internally as part of their own offering or using the Enomaly public service . Universities, generally, have seasonal loads on their servers and so have long periods of underutilized servers that could be offered up to SpotCloud. It is also ideal for many of the new distributed green clouds being deployed on farms and at stranded windmills. The recent Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Clarkson university project is a good example of this approach. Spotcloud allows them to quickly offer commercial cloud services without going through the messy process of SLAs etc. It is also a great opportunity for small business to experiment using and offering cloud services – BSA]

http://www.spotcloud.com/For-Sellers.28.0.html

------

Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com

twitter: BillStArnaud

blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

skype: Pocketpro

Commercial cloud services for universities and HPC gain momentum - Internet 2 announcement

2011-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

[Today’s Internet 2 announcement of brokering commercial cloud services from HP, Box and SHI is the start of a major trend that will transform computing at universities and eventually businesses.
This is likely to be the first of many announcements on “above the net” services from Internet 2. Moving university IT departments and researchers from the traditional “client-server” mindset to delivering services from the cloud will enable new applications and services at much lower cost. This will create new business opportunities for NRENs and small businesses. The NSF XSEDE announcement of spending $35m per year to develop these services and applications for researchers is a great example of this approach. Not only will this provide a potential new service revenue for NRENs, but it has the potential to significantly reduce overall costs to universities by several millions of dollars per year per institution. A CANARIE funded study undertaken by IISD, demonstrated that the energy savings alone could pay for the retirement of thousands of servers on campuses in favor of clouds. Even traditional research computing users are also starting to move clouds as more and more computation becomes data intensive. HPC, has long been dominated by the “modeling” community of astrophysics, computational chemistry, fluid dynamics, etc. But now the biggest growth in research computing is data analysis and knowledge extraction in fields such astro-informatics, computational biology and (yes) even computational history. This type of research computing is orders of magnitude larger than traditional HPC modeling and is ideally suited for commercial clouds. Some excerpts – BSA]

IISD study on how energy savings can pay for the move to cloud computing
http://www.iisd.org/publications/pub.aspx?id=1341

XSEDE – Accelerating science by outsourcing the mundane
http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/rpi-talk-foster-september-2011

Accelerating Scientific Discovery for Research via the Cloud
http://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2011/09/it-is-fall-there-must-be-clouds.html
[….]
Throughout the history of science, data has been scarce and precious. Indeed, the modern scientific method is defined by a careful cycle of hypothesis and experiment, which gathers experimental data to test the hypothesis. In a few short years, scientists and engineers have gone from scarcity to an incredible richness, necessitating a significant change in how they manage and extract insight from all this data. In a parallel shift, many of our scientific, engineering and societal questions increasingly lie at the intersections of traditional disciplines.
Increasing data volumes and the complexity of collaboration on interdisciplinary problems are challenging our historical approaches to discovery and innovation via computing. Most researchers and research institutions are ill-prepared for the large-scale computing infrastructure management challenges posed by large data sets and complex models. The cloud and associated applications and tools offer a possible solution to this challenge by letting scientists be scientists.

The U.S. government can accelerate this transition by encouraging the purchase of cloud services, in addition to the acquisition of local IT infrastructure, and by supporting new tools that facilitate distributed collaboration and simplify access to multidisciplinary scientific data. As I have noted before, Microsoft is acting on this belief, working in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Fostering Continued Support for Computing Research and Education

Today's cloud technology is derived from basic computing research conducted over the past four decades. To ensure that the U.S. continues to remain at the forefront of cloud technology, continued investment in basic research is critical. There are deep and open questions in areas as diverse as the future of silicon scaling and system-on-a-chip design, energy-efficient systems, primary and secondary storage, data mining and analytics, wired and wireless networks, system resilience and reliability, privacy and security, and user interfaces and accessibility, to name just a few. Insights and innovations from this research will spawn new companies, create jobs and reshape our future.

In addition to continued research investment, it is critical to support the pipeline that produces researchers, and others who will able to invent new uses of the cloud and information technology. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the computing sector will have 1.5 million job openings over the next 10 years, yet the number of graduates receiving Bachelors, Masters or Ph.D. computer science degrees is far short of that. In addition, we must strengthen the quality of and access to computing education at all levels. Consistent with these concerns about the IT workforce and computing education, Microsoft is a founding member of theComputing

Internet2 NET+ Services To Deliver Cloud Services To University Faculty, Staff and Students Nationwide
http://www.internet2.edu/news/pr/2011.10.04.net-services.html
New partnerships announced with HP, SHI International and Box
Raleigh, N.C.—Oct. 4, 2011—Internet2, the world’s most advanced networking consortium, today announced individual partnerships with HP, SHI International and Box to deliver new Internet2 NET+ Services, including cloud computing and infrastructure services, to Internet2 members’ faculty, staff and students nationwide. The announcement was made at today’s Internet2 Fall Member Meeting.

“These partnerships benefit our members by making secure and very affordable cloud computing services available anywhere, anytime,” said Dave Lambert, President and CEO, Internet2. “By leveraging existing community investments, Internet2 provides seamless access to standard and customized offerings from industry leaders for chief information officers in higher education to consider in their technology plans. Internet2 NET+ Services are the next generation of value from Internet2.“

Internet2 NET+ Services provide “above the network” services to Internet2 member organizations, including higher education, government, and industry. Cornell University; Indiana University; Penn State; University of California, Berkeley; University of Michigan; University of Notre Dame; University of Utah; and other Internet2 participating campuses will immediately begin testing and validating some of the specific offerings and services. The new services will create a platform tailored to the needs of the Internet2 community, and will leverage Internet2’s 100G network and InCommon identity management services. Higher education members who are InCommon subscribers may purchase Box and HP services in early 2012, as part of their annual membership.

Based on the HP Converged Infrastructure and HP Cloud System solutions, HP, in conjunction with SHI, will provide a “private community cloud” suite of infrastructure services that are designed to meet required levels of security, performance and availability for higher education. HP and SHI will operate these services for the Internet2 community. SHI Cloud combines best-of-breed technologies to create the most secure, high-performance, and industrial grade cloud offering with private, dedicated, managed or multi-tenant options. Indiana University; Penn State; University of Notre Dame; and the University of Utah will participate in a pilot program after which the service will be made broadly available.

“Top research institutions require flexible, affordable cloud services to be able to conduct some of the most important, compute-intensive research in the world,” said Rich Geraffo, senior vice president and managing director of HP Enterprise business. “HP and SHI are teaming up to deliver Internet2 members the reliability, performance and scalability required to further advance these innovative efforts.”

“Academic communities are driving innovation in every industry, and they require a cloud platform that’s powerful, secure, and scalable to support their computing needs,” says Thai Lee, president and CEO of SHI. “By joining forces with HP and Internet2, we’ll be able to deliver and manage an affordable private cloud that will let research teams focus on their work, not their IT department. Further, our robust industrial-grade cloud platform will support the core mission of Internet2 by delivering technology that goes beyond today and meets future needs of the computing world.”

Supercomputing center targets big, fast storage cloud at academics, industry
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/supercomputing-center-targets-55-petabyte-storage-at-academics-students.ars

By Jon Brodkin | Published about 2 hours ago
A storage cloud with 10 Gigabit Ethernet speed and scalability to hundreds of petabytes has been launched to provide virtually unlimited storage capacity to supercomputing customers.
Built by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, the SDSC Cloud has 5.5PB to begin with, but “is scalable by orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes, with aggregate performance and capacity both scaling almost linearly with growth,” the SDSC says.
The supercomputing center believes this is the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the United States, and said it is designed for researchers, students, academics and industry users who need secure and cost-effective storage for data sets of any size. Each object stored will have a unique URL for sharing.
SDSC’s project is another example of cloud computing expanding the accessibility of high-performance computing(HPC) functionality once reserved for an exclusive set of institutions. Instead of being forced to build out huge clusters inside your own data centers, customers can outsource supercomputing needs to cloud vendors. Amazon offers special cluster compute instances for just such a purpose, and even built a supercomputer on the Elastic Compute Cloud that ranked among the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world. Another project recently featured by Ars used the Amazon compute cloud to build a 30,000-core cluster for a pharmaceutical company that ran for about seven hours at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour.

http://gizmodo.com/5843899/the-largest-cloud-server-in-all-of-academia

The Cloud Server So Large They Should Call It "Hurricane"

As computational-heavy research gains momentum, the amount of data researchers generate is exploding—a single sequencing of DNA requires as much as 28 terabytes. So where do American researchers store their most ginormous data sets? In the largest academic cloud server in the US, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The SDSC Cloud has an initial capacity of 5.5 petabytes—roughly 250 billion pages of text—and achieves sustained read rates of 8-10GB/s—that's 250GB every 30 seconds. And that's just to start. The Cloud is scalable, on-demand, up to hundreds of petabytes. "We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers, especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new era of data-intensive research and computing," said Michael Norman, director of SDSC said in a press release. "The SDSC Cloud goes a long way toward meeting federal data sharing requirements, since every data object has a unique URL and could be accessed over the Web."
------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

IPv6 Transitional Uncertainties and the role of R&E networks and universities

2011-09-21T06:44:00.001-07:00

[Here is an excellent article on the uncertainties of IPv6 transition. R&E networks and universities probably have the single largest number of unallocated IPv4 address space.
Therefore I think they have a critical role in enabling and ensuring a smooth transition from IPv4 to some future network addressing scheme that enshrines the end-to-end principle and layer Internet architecture. Providing address blocks to open access community networks as part of the institution’s address space, retiring IP address blocks to insure elimination of energy hogging servers, partnering on deployment of R&E IPv6 3G/4G wireless networks, etc are some of the ideas I have blogged about in the past on how R&E networks can help in this transition.
Although I agree with Geoff that we need to prevent accidental transitional strategy, I remain skeptical that IPv6 is the future nirvana of networking. Maybe it is time to start thinking beyond IPv6 and DNS and look for solutions that are not only backwards compatible, but also provide significant new value to the end user. Alphanumeric addressing, XML routing, delay tolerant networking, etc are some of the ideas floating out there. –BSA]

Moving Beyond IPv6 and DNS
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-comes-after-ipv6-and-dns.html

The Address plus Port (A+P) Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6346.txt

IPv6 Transitional Uncertainties
http://www.circleid.com/posts/ipv6_transitional_uncertainties/
By Geoff Huston

When we look back at previous technology transitions in our industry, they all look just so logical.
[..]
What about the transition from IPv4 to IPv6? Is this also an inevitable transition? There is no doubt that the designers of IPv6 certainly envisaged this as an inevitable transition. But there are some challenges here.
The first is that the transition does not provide for backwards compatibility. A host cannot switch from using IPv4 to IPv6 and still communicate with all the hosts still using IPv4. So the transition has an essential "dual stack" phase where, during the transition, hosts operate with both protocol stacks concurrently, using the IPv6 protocol stack to speak to other IPv6 hosts and the IPv4 protocol stack to speak to other IPv4 hosts. This lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6 makes the transition slightly more complex, but not prohibitively so. What it means is that applications and host operating systems need to be aware of IPv6 and explicitly have capabilities to use IPv6. It's not a seamless augmentation at the application interface level.
There an additional challenge here that is formidable, and one that was largely unforeseen when IPv6 was being designed. At the time there was the general impression that the telecommunications industry behaved prudently, and given the warnings of the prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, industry actors, being prudent and risk averse, would embark on the transition to IPv6 well in advance of IPv4 address exhaustion. And one or two did. But everyone else did not. And now we have the challenge of trying to undertake this dual stack transition while one stack is critically short of further address space. This factor radically alters the dynamics of the transition. In order to make the IPv4 part of the transition work for the requisite number of additional years it will be necessary to deploy additional "middleware" in the network, and head in a different direction architecturally.
The most obvious shift is probably going to be one of deployment of Carrier Grade NATs (CGNs) in access networks. This will allow a single public IPv4 address to be shared across multiple end clients. The longer the transition takes the more likely that this alone will not be sufficient, and we may expect to see a push to re-architect content into Content Distribution Networks that have points of presence in major access networks. It is also possible that network providers may resort to Application Level Gateways (ALGs) and managed services in an effort to further contain the level of IPv4 address and port consumption by user services.
The risk here is that after making this additional capital investment in network infrastructure, the network service provider is then highly motivated to protect the value of this investment. What lengths will network service providers be prepared to go to in order to protect this investment in transitional services? And if these transitional services generate higher revenues for the network service provider than basic commodity packet transit services, to what extent is the network service provider then motivated to lock itself into this "transitional" service model for an extended period? Would this imply that rather than being a transitory state we see these changes to the network lasting for an indefinite period.
If one sector of the industry finds that this transitional model of providing services sufficiently attractive, is it possible that it could have sufficient market influence such the entire service provider industry collectively locks into this "transitional" model as an enduring service model? If this was to eventuate the internet would be driven in an entirely different direction than IPv6!
[..]
The challenge we face is to sustain the IPv4 half of the dual stack environment in the face of continuing escalation of demand for addresses. For many years the conventional networking environment has included the use of a NAT device at the interface between the network and the user. Increased pressure on addresses is now forcing network service providers to place a second level of NAT inside their network as part of the network infrastructure.
This process of transition is expected to take many years, I have heard commentary to suggest that five years is unrealistically short, and we should expect a transition that may take a decade or longer. But will CGNs last for a further decade of network growth during this extended transition? The next step after CGNs is to break apart the end-to-end network model and start to erect connectivity "barriers" or "walled gardens". The tools to do this include re-homing a copy of certain content "inside" the network as a next step, then, as a further step in address 'compression', using application level gateways rather than address level IP header translators.
The current approach to IPv4 exhaustion will see different regions experiencing different IPv4 scarcity pressures at any point in time. In the Asia Pacific Region the momentum to deploy CGNs as the first response to IPv4 address scarcity is already visible. However, other regions are not experiencing the same pressure at this time. If one were to project this further forward by 18 months to 2013 the European region would also have exhausted its pool of IPv4 addresses, but the other three regions may well be operating in a mode that is still able to meet regional demands for IPv4 addresses. It is highly likely that at that time the different regions will be experiencing very different market pressures for the provision of Internet services, due to differing transitional pressures from IPv4 exhaustion.
The consequent question is: What's the level of risk that the differing environments of transition lead to significantly different outcomes in each region as the process of transition takes of a different momentum in different regions? And if this eventuates will we still have a single coherent Internet as a common asset, or will we find that market forces interact in unpredictable ways that create different outcomes in each region?
What of the plan to ultimately converge to an IPv6 network? It may be useful to remember the myth of the long term plan. Are we still as firmly committed to the long term plans we formulated 5 or 10 years ago? Or have we found that our plans are continually modified and refined over time, and there is actually little left of the original plan. So will we be as firmly committed to the transition to IPv6 in five years time? Or will we manage to lose the plot and head into different directions because of the different spread of pressures on service providers in each of the regions. We will forget about the intention to preserve the concept of a single global network in amidst the difficulties of this disparate transition?
On Maintaining the Momentum for IPv6
Can we help the Internet during this transition, and try to ensure that the Internet remains a single coherent network with some essential architectural attributes of end-to-end clarity? Or, if we want to aim a little lower, can we at least minimize the potential for disastrous long term damage to this phenomenally productive and valuable networking environment that the Internet has enabled?
I don't know the answer to those questions, but I would like to offer a small number of thoughts that I have had when thinking about this topic.
If we want a single working Internet at the end of all of this, then we need to keep an eye on the larger picture of network evolution during transition. We need to find ways for self interest and local interest to converge with what is in our common interest. Without that convergence we will see a form of market failure where the common interest of a single global network, and the value that such a service can generate, being lost to network divergence through the exercise of differing local market pressures. I'm not sure that I understand how to ensure that self interest aligns with common interest in every circumstance, but what would be good to avoid is building a network that imposes major barriers and inefficiencies all in the name of address conservation in IPv4, and then citing the investment in this additional infrastructure as grounds for not progressing with the transition to IPv6.
Secondly, IPv4 addresses should be used in working networks and not hoarded. Its probably a natural reaction to impending scarcity to hoard a resource, but its not necessarily a good reaction. Hoarding behaviour exacerbates the scarcity of the resource in both its intensity and duration. This generalization is also true in the specific context of IPv4 exhaustion and transition. The scarcity of IPv4 addresses creates market uncertainty and market pain in the form of a reduced revenue outlook across the transition period. Extending this scarcity through hoarding and other forms of witholding addresses from use in the network acts to prolong the market pain and increase the unpredictability of the entire transition process.
And finally, we need to keep the transition as quick as possible. A rapid transition represents the best chance of achieving an IPv6 network as an outcome of this process. The more time we spend investing time, money and effort in deploying IPv4 address extension mechanisms, the higher the risk that we will lose track of the temporary nature of transition and the higher the possibility that we'll get stuck with the wrong Internet at the end! If we are truly committed to achieving a single and coherent IPv6 Internet then perhaps its necessary to act now to compress the timelines for transition, not extend them!
By Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC. (The above views do not necessarily represent the views of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre.)
Related topics: IP Addressing, IPv6, Regional Registries, Top-Level Domains
------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Very cool project between SURFnet and Ericsson for LTE on Dutch universities

2011-09-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

[I am always astounded and amazed how a small R&E networking organization like SURFnet has become such a powerful engine of innovation, not only for Dutch universities, but the Dutch economy in general.
I am proud, to have contributed, in a my very small way, to these developments. This latest project by SURFnet is something I have been blogging about for some time.

Ericsson has been contracted by SURFnet to perform a technology scouting study for a private 4G LTE network.
Key principles:
– Private campus network without own users
– Guest access for registered users from all providers, special national roaming
– Can function with an existing SIM
– No new subscription
– No changes to the device
– No user intervention required
– Phones from registered users switch automatically when entering campus area

What is especially cool about this project, is how the national service will be funded in partnership with a national carrier. More on that later – BSA]
http://bit.ly/oCqvIF

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

R&E networks once again revolutionizing Internet through content peering

2011-09-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

[I recently attended the annual GLIF meeting (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) in Rio de Janeiro where there was a lot of buzz and excitement about recent developments in lambda networking and new transformative business models for R&E networks.
The GLIF is the “G20” of the of the most innovative R&E networks around the world and meets annually to explore the future of international R&E networking.

Although a lot of discussion focused on how to use international wavelengths to support big science, the most intriguing developments were hallway discussions I had with various participants on how once again R&E networks are transforming the global Internet through disruptive innovation.

The biggest transformation in the business model for R&E networks is the staggering success of content peering. Content peering is where R&E networks exchange traffic, at no cost, with major content providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc and peer directly, again at no cost with numerous Tier 2 Internet Service Providers.

Although all R&E networks first objective is to support the advancement of education and research, their bread and butter revenue is helping education institutions significantly reduce their commercial Internet costs by providing content peering services. Only a few years ago content peering reduced an institutions Internet costs by as much as 40%. Recent data from several R&E networks shows that content peering has now allowed institutions to reduce their commercial Internet costs by as much as 90%! Universities without content peering may pay several hundred thousand or several million dollars a year in commercial Internet costs. But with content peering they have been able to dramatically reduce these costs through a much smaller membership or network connection fee to the R&E network. This membership fee then cross subsidizes the very important network services required for research and education such as global lambdas etc. Many R&E networks also don’t “meter” consumption of content peering traffic and instead base membership or network connection fee on the size of the institution or connecting pipe.

Content peering is also a big driver for international lambdas as many R&E networks expend their peering reach or agree to exchange peering routes between themselves.

Content peering has allowed most R&E networks to become operationally self sufficient. Even if you take the fully loaded cost of amortizing routers and fiber demonstrates that Internet services can be delivered significantly less than the carriers are charging today, and clearly show that argument for Usage Based Pricing is a bunch of hooey.

Content peering is going to revolutionize the Internet in a couple of other ways as well. For example, many universities in North America are shutting down cable TV connectivity to the residences because of the inexorable rising costs. Instead students are now down loading their TV entertainment over the Internet. At one small institution with only 2500 students in residence this has resulted in a dramatic jump in Internet traffic of almost a Terabyte a day! Without content peering the university would either have to dramatically throttle this traffic or pay huge bills to their commercial Internet provider. It is also amusing to see how students have developed sophisticated encryption technologies to avoid detection by the Copyright Gestapo of the RIAA and MPAA.

Some R&E networks except to see the real growth in content peering not to be with universities but with K-12 schools. Many school boards are now looking at tablets like the iPad as a replacement for textbooks and computer desktop initiatives. The driver for this is surprisingly energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Many K-12 desktop computer programs failed because the biggest cost was not the computers themselves, but the cost of installing electrical outlets at each desk. As well many schools have eliminated lockers, for safety reasons, which forces the kids to carry all their textbooks to and from school. According to recent data the total life cycle CO2 impact of a tablet is equivalent to approximately 22 books. Most students easily read over 22 books when you take into account textbooks and books read for pleasure or reading assignments. Tablets can last virtually all day without charging and when they need charging they can be plugged into charging stations that are powered solely by rooftop solar panels or micro windmills.

As I have long argued, I believe the Internet will essentially be free and unlimited. This is clearly the trend we are seeing with some of the world’s leading R&E networks. The largest cost component will be amortization of the infrastructure which will be paid for, not through user fees or bandwidth consumption, but by energy savings and CO2 reduction. Energy and GHG reduction will also be a much viable revenue stream for artists and copyright holders as opposed to Medieval practices of try to block content trough DMCA take down notices. For more details please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ -- BSA]

For more reading please
www.glif.is

Big cable is facing an ‘affordability crisis’

http://gigaom.com/video/cable-tv-affordability-crisis/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

A study of Microsoft Office distribution comparing DVD delivery to e-delivery concluded that e-delivery can reduce CO2e up to 88%.
Music
The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods examines six use cases. "We find that despite the increased energy and emissions associated with Internet data flows, purchasing music digitally reduces the energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions associated with delivering music to customers by between 40 and 80% from the best-case physical CD delivery…"
Books
The environmental impact of Amazon’s Kindle
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/marketplace/sustainability-answers/The%20environmental%20impact%20of%20the%20Amazon%20Kindle.pdf
is based on a use case of an e-reader displacing 22.5 purchased books a year, about one every two weeks. The study finds that the negative impact of the e-reader is about the same as one year's positive impact of the e-books. "That indicates that an e-reader device would have no net environmental impact in its first year of ownership for the typical user, but every year of subsequent use would compound its benefits. The same holds true when looking at the total number of e-reader devices sold across the globe. We estimate that the emissions prevented by e-reader devices in 2012 will be more than double the amount of emissions created in the manufacturing, use, and disposal of the devices." The paper notes that the savings from additional e-delivery of magazines and newspapers make the comparison even better.
The use of tablets like Apple's iPad as e-readers likely improves the e-book equation, as the device's footprint is spread over multiple uses, including e-delivery of music and movies.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era - NREN opportunity

2011-08-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

[More evidence that Apple is working on software configurable SIMs that will eventually will break the Homer/Bart Simpson stranglehold the carriers have over consumers.
As I have blogged in the past R&E networks have a fantastic opportunity to transform the wireless Internet market much in the same way that transformed the old telephone market with initial deployment of Internet, customer owned dark fiber, and software defined networks.

The new Apple and Google cell phones will allow seamless integration with Wiifi. Given the extensive Wifi roaming capability with Eudroam it is a natural next step. Seeing the tricks that carriers play to hamstring your phone ( http://bit.ly/pprJDc) to extract monopoly rent on wireless networks, Apple’s new phone cant come soon enough – BSA]

How Carriers Hamstring Your Smart Phone http://bit.ly/pprJDcI wonder how companies justify these kinds of business practices to themselves

Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era

http://seekingalpha.com/article/290109-apple-may-end-mobile-phone-contract-era

The most intriguing Apple (AAPL) rumor since Steve Jobs' retirement is that the iPhone 5, due out next month, will work on any wireless network. This decoupling of phones from networks has been approaching for some time. It's a capability you can expect Android makers to follow quickly. The decoupling, combined with WiFi capability, could be horrible news for carriers. At a stroke it could remove their pricing power over customers.

That could be reflected in profits (and thus stock prices) of companies like AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Vodafone (VOD) and Sprint (S). It could give Apple and Google (GOOG) a lot more power over their ecosystems. The technology to do this has been around for some time, and this in fact could explain why Google decided to buy Motorola Mobility (MMI).

[…]

Paolini: Wi-Fi offloading - build your own Wi-Fi network or share it?
http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/paolini-wi-fi-offloading-build-your-own-wi-fi-network-or-share-it/2011-08-02?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+volweb%2FWRsA+%28News+from+openspectrum.info%29&utm_content=Twitter

Wi-Fi hotspots, the once and future network king
http://dlvr.it/jJtpM

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Cool new app to protect on line privacy - Unhosted with Federated Identity

2011-08-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Whenever you post content to the web (images, text, video, music...), it is kept on the servers of that particular application. This means that your online data is stored in centralized servers belonging to various companies, meaning it's not really yours any more.

What if there were a way, that not only ensures security, freedom and control over your data, but also provides a better experience for both users and developers while resolving some of the other issues of the current web architecture?

www.unhosted.org

Unhosted is an open web standard for decentralizing user data. On the unhosted web, data is stored per-user, wherever the user decides. Unhosted is building a framework in which all of a web application's code is run on the client-side, and users have the freedom to choose any remote data storage location they like. The storage nodes use strong encryption, and because they are decoupled from the application provider, users always have the freedom to switch between them or to shut off their accounts entirely.

SURFnet in the coming year are experimenting with a small Proof-of-Concept to see how Unhosted can be joined with a federated identity. If successful, they intend to make a second Proof-of-Concept with an existing (open-source) application. The application will make use of the unhosted standard and it will be run via the SURFconext-collaboration platform (http://www.surfnet.nl/en/Thema/coin/Pages/Default.aspx). If the SURFnet pilots are successful, unhosted with federated identity may be the new killer app for the Internet and could help address many concerns that privacy experts worry about in terms of who controls and owns your personal data.
.

------
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro