Internet2 and You

Computerworld - Ladies and gentlemen, start your routers.

Imagine that your network supported a fail-over system that could handle 3.47GB/hr. of data exchange between your primary and backup servers. That would be pretty cool, huh? Now, imagine that the backup server was 3,000 miles across the country. Way, way cool.

That's essentially what the folks at the University of Oregon in Eugene accomplished late last September with their cohorts at NYSERNet, a nonprofit networking organization in Syracuse, N.Y. Oh, and they did this using IPv6, the most advanced networking protocol today.

The IT wizards who accomplished this feat bragged (somewhat tongue in cheek) that this was a new "land speed record" for data transfer: 39.81 terabit-meters per second.

The record stood barely a week when in early October, European researchers transmitted all the data from a CD-ROM more than 9,000 miles in 17 seconds for the equivalent of an astounding 5,154 terabit-meters per second.

These "races" have been taking place on Internet2, or I2, as it's called. I2 is the global network being driven by 200 U.S. universities, with some help from affiliated academic institutions, government agencies and IT vendors such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. And these races aren't just for fun. Joe St Sauver, director of user services network applications at the University of Oregon, regularly backs up 60GB of data from Eugene to Syracuse via I2. "It's a daily routine," he says.

I2 came into being because commercial use of the old, clunky Internet was getting bogged down with too many packets slinging Amazon.com book orders, corporate e-mails, AOL chat sessions and the daily chaos that makes it such a lively place. I2 is strictly for noncommercial, serious, state-of-the-art network-related R&D work -- with a little data race being held now and again.

There were initial hopes by some companies, such as FedEx Corp., when Internet2 was being created that they, too, would directly benefit from the interconnected high-speed points of presence, or POPs. However, the peering relationships (the links between the broadband WANs) remain distinct for I2 and commercial users. And by all accounts, they'll remain that way.

What I2 Means for You
But just because I2 is reserved for the IT equivalent of an ivory tower, that doesn't mean it won't affect some of us directly and all of us indirectly. For example, if you run IT operations for a medical research center, you'll likely be getting recruited to build I2 links so surgeons on your site will be able to assist or, with robots, even perform operations across towns, continents and oceans. Just last month in Chicago, 60,000 radiologists at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America were treated to a half-dozen real-world applications of I2 in the exciting new world of telemedicine.

Admittedly, such projects today will be rare and expensive. But I2 researchers are on the forefront, using technologies that we will all use soon.

Joanne Hugi, associate vice president for information services at the University of Oregon, points out that I2 has been the testbed for IPv6. "And IT people will follow what I2 has done there," she says.

Furthermore, she points out that the vendors involved are learning new tricks for measuring and improving product performance that will make their way into the systems we buy and deploy.

In the area of security and privacy, I2 researchers have developed software called Shibboleth that uses a breakthrough method for authentication, and I2's distributed storage initiative offers IT planners insight into how to build storage networks bridging vast distances.

All of this comes with the serious caveat that these researchers, unlike most of the rest of us, have access to big bundles of bandwidth. It's the cornerstone of I2. But, thanks to the giddy days of the 1990s Internet, there's plenty of latent bandwidth available.

In Oregon, along the Interstate 5 corridor alone, more than 140,000 miles of fiber-optic cable has been installed, and 95% of it is dark. Of course, lighting it won't come cheap. But the $1 billion investment to lay the basic infrastructure in this single, middle-of-the-pack state is nearly complete.

So when the applications are ready for us to set our own land speed records for commercial data, we know the track is already there, and I2's researchers will have paved the way.

Mark Hall is Computerworld's opinions editor. Contact him at mark_hall@computerworld.com.