Randy Frank has been appointed chief technology officer of the Internet2 university consortium. He says in an interview that the Internet2 functions as an academic network with which institutions can "experiment with all the technologies that we're no longer able to drive adoption on the commodity network."
Frank says that Internet2 collaborates with leading organizations around the world to construct a global research network, and he cites the Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN) currently establishing dedicated high-performance connections through alliances with sister European and Asian networks. "With DCN, you can build a network where one is able to dial up — figuratively speaking of course — a sustained amount of bandwidth for a short period of time without the expense of dedicated circuits," he says.
Among the initiatives Frank champions is multicasting, which Internet2 is enabled for. "We can send a single stream across the Internet and not replicate anything unnecessarily," he notes. Frank also is a heavy supporter of IPv6, and he stresses that organizations similar to Internet2 need to increasingly push the benefits of IPv6. Frank points out that unlike network address translation, IPv6 will not lead to situations in which multiple people use the same address space during mergers and acquisitions. He also praises Internet2's Shibboleth middleware technology, which builds a model to permit cross authentication so that campuses can verify the trustworthiness of other campuses' authentication model.
From Network World
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Abstracts Copyright © 2009 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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