Draft Minutes of the Meeting of the South Eastern Region Janet User Group held 15 October 2014 Woburn House, 20 Tavistock Square, London. WC1H 9HQ Attendees Name Affiliation E-mail Ashley Culver University of Cambridge Aec31@vcs.cam.ac.uk Gary Dooley Cranfield University g.dooley@cranfield.ac.uk Vin Everett JDRF/Wt DIL Bob Findlay Norwich BioScience Institutes bob.findlay@nbi.ac.uk Chris Greenwood The Babraham Institute chris.greenwood@babraham.ac.uk Gavin Harrison Rothamsted Research Gavin.harrison@rothamsted.ac.uk John Herd (Chair) University Campus Suffolk J.Herd@ucs.ac.uk Andrew Paxton University of East Anglia a.paxton@uea.ac.uk Shirley Wood Janet Shirley.Wood@ja.net Apologies Name Affiliation E-mail Will Barber EBI will@ebi.ac.uk Jonathan Barker EBI jbarker@ebi.ac.uk Gordon Bridges MRC Technology Gordon.Bridges@tech.mrc.ac.uk Frances Burton Janet Frances.Burton@ja.net Jon Holgate University of Cambridge Jh535@cam.ac.uk Mike Luscombe University of Sussex M.J.Luscombe@sussex.ac.uk John Seymour Janet John.Seymour@ja.net Tim Wetten Suffolk County Council HP Software Defined Networking - Eugene Berger, Chief Technologist, HP Enterprise Group Eugene Berger gave an excellent presentation on HP Software Defined Networking which prompted many questions. Page 1 of 5
Minutes of the meeting held on May 14th 2014 The minutes of the previous meeting held were accepted. Matters arising There were no matters arising. The meeting asked where the minutes of previous meetings were now held and what was happening with the information currently held on the SERJUG web site at London South Bank University. John Herd had been unable to contact staff at London South Bank University about the maintenance of the website. It was suggested that moving the web pages is only way to maintain the information. John Herd agreed to identify a new host site for the information and transfer all the data for the next meeting. Action: John Herd Janet Service Performance Shirley distributed copies of the dashboard for the Eastern area up to the end of August. A copy of the dashboards can be found in the Janet East of England pages on the Janet Community pages. See https://community.ja.net/groups/janet-east-england/document/janet-east-england-service-report-september-2014 Shirley agreed to provide individual dashboards for those present. Janet Report Jisc changes Janet now formed part of the Jisc group. Staff e-mail The personal mailboxes of Janet staff will migrate to Office 365 in the next few months and will change to firstname.lastname@jisc.ac.uk. E-mail addresses such as service@ja.net will be preserved. Janet News From autumn 2014 Jisc s Inform newsletter will be redeveloped to include content from across the whole Jisc group, and this will include items that have previously been part of Janet News. Together these developments mean that news about the Janet network, and other Jisc products and services, will be getting out to customers much more frequently. Jisc Inform will now encompass the content that was previously in Janet News, and that there will be no further issues of Janet News. From its October issue onwards, Jisc Inform will be produced as a rolling online publication aggregated and issued bi-monthly; it will be available in multiple formats, including a limited print, to suit needs/requirements of our customers. Items will be produced and released digitally, continuously, in a timely way, and through a range of features, articles, blogs and other formats. Every two months, they will be aggregated into a digitally released publication. This means articles can be much timelier, and released based on need rather than constrained by a publication date. Janet Quarterly Report The last Janet report noted that the future of the Janet Quarterly Report was under review, and following a consultation period, there was insufficient interest from the community to justify the further publication of the report and it will be discontinued. The detailed technical information that used to be present in the report could be included in the reports to regional stakeholder groups. Customer Engagement Jisc is planning major changes to the way in which it supports customers across its entire portfolio of services. Details of these proposals can be found by searching for customer engagement on the Jisc web site. There is Page 2 of 5
an ongoing consultation process regarding staff currently delivering support services to Jisc so the plans currently in the public domain may be subject to some modification because of that process. Product Management Following a consultation, the Janet webmail service was retired at the end of September. This was because the customer base was very small and reducing. Customers have been offered free alternatives via Janet partnerships with Google and Microsoft. The proposal to scale up the existing live event streaming service is still being taken through the product development processes. There has been an increase in the uptake of the eduroam service by FE colleges over the summer. Janet has been involved in discussions with a few councils about the use of eduroam and govroam. The meeting expressed an interest in the work being done with local councils and eduroam. Cambridge University had worked with their local council earlier in the year to provide eduroam across the city. Similarly the meeting were interested in the use of eduroam and NHS sites. Shirley agreed to put Malcolm Teague who was involved with the NHS on behalf of Janet in touch with NBI, UEA and UCS. Regional Network Infrastructure Delays are still being experienced deploying the new networks in the West Midlands and London, problems mainly relate to delays in provisioning. Procurements are now underway for the North West and North East regions. The project to end the JPA contract with YHMAN was completed at the end of September. Meetings have been held with ClydeNET and EastMAN to begin the process of taking these in house by the end of September 2015. The PSBA in Wales and KPSN in Kent have both been re-procured. Security and Enhanced Information Assurance In response to Government and customer concerns about the growing risk to university networks and computer systems to attacks by criminals and nation states, Janet is planning to develop services designed to offer enhanced information on cyber threats and to provide advice to customers on how to secure their networks and end systems. Part of this programme of work is to achieve accreditation to ISO 27001. There is a significant investment in medical research aimed at unlocking the value of the data collected by the government and NHS in order to further knowledge and research. However patient health data is extremely sensitive and could be misused, so there are a number of ethical, consensual and practical hurdles to consider when making use of that data for research. The Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research, is a collaboration between a number the Higher Education Institutions across the UK with 37.5M of MRC funding to provide the physical and electronic infrastructure to facilitate collaboration across the four nodes, support their safe use of patient and research data for medical research, and enable partnerships by providing a physical structure to co-locate NHS organizations, industry, and other UK academic centres. Janet will be collaborating with Farr to build secure encrypted network overlays to enable the transfer of sensitive data and to establish secure aaccess and identity management systems. The aim is to produce a solution which can be offered to any Janet customer who needs to transfer data at higher information assurance levels. Cambridge were interested in the work taking place with Farr. Shirley will ask Henry Hughes to contact Cambridge about this work. Data Centre Framework Janet has secured, a five-year framework agreement with Infinity, a specialist data centre provider, for the provision of datacentre facilities. This will be the first shared data centre for medical and academic research in the UK. The funding of approximately 900,000 has been provided by HEFCE. The data centre will house the IT of a consortium of six anchor tenants. The data centre will be connected to the Janet network core and part of its backbone, facilitating access, reducing costs and meeting the bandwidth necessary to move large data sets. Page 3 of 5
Infinity will operate the data centre at its Slough data centre. The design combines a traditional three tier datacentre with a flexible range of low to high power rack densities and an aggregated discount pricing structure across all organisations using the service, ensuring that the infrastructure is workload focused and value driven. The initial partners are: The Francis Crick Institute, Kings College London, LSE, QMUL, The Sanger Institute and UCL. Customers interested in finding out about how they can make the most of the data centre please contact 0300 300 2212 or visit https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services/shared-data-centre The meeting was interested in further information about the costs of using the Infinity data centre. Cloud Services Uptake of Microsoft Office365 continues with some 60+ organisations signed up and more in progress. The File Sync and Share framework has been built by working with universities on their requirements. The framework consists of four lots :- basic file sync and share, then within EU/EEA, encrypted services, and lastly federated services. The first contracts are going through. Contracts are going through on the Archive to Tape Framework. It was reported that the new Amazon portal is due to go live in the next few weeks. The portal would enable organisations to receive invoices for their use of AWS. Janet is looking to strengthen the relationship working with universities and Google, both to address current operational/support issues and to bring more Google products to the sector in an assured way. Trans National Education Transnational Education (TNE) is an area of significant and growing interest to the UK education sector. The range and number of TNE activities, such as remote campuses or joint degree programmes, continues to grow rapidly, with expected continued growth in the coming years. TNE is also rising up the political agenda owing to its potential as a high earning export industry; Supporting Transnational Education is one of the key policy strands in the UK Government s International Education Strategy. Historically Janet s offerings have been delivered almost exclusively within the UK. However in response to the growing demand from the community, we have made a strategic decision improve the support we offer for your developing TNE activities. Through the Janet TNE strategy and support programme we seek to address customer requirements for cost-effective, appropriate and reliable connectivity services overseas, integrated with Janet s UK-based operations and Janet s other services, to support TNE delivery on a global basis. There is a group on the community web site for any person or organisation interested in Janet developing transnational education programme of activities; this community site will be a valuable source of information to Janet to understand your requirements as the company develops its overseas support over the coming months. Janet has established a strategic partnership with CERNET, the Chinese NRN which has given rise to increased bandwidth for international transit at no cost, and an increase in quality for UK Higher Education Institutions working in China. In Malaysia, Janet has established a good relationship with a commercial ISP and established a MAN to link the EduCity campuses of Newcastle and Southampton universities. Reading s campus will be connected on 2015. Anyone who would like Janet s assistance with international connectivity should contact Dr. Esther Wilkinson on 01235 822 124 or esther.wilkinson@ja.net Page 4 of 5
Dates of Future Meetings The dates of the 2015 meetings are: 11 February 2015 13 May 2015 14 October 2015 All meetings will take place at the Janet offices, 3 rd Floor, 100 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8AL. Meetings with start at 2:15. Any Other Business John Herd was keen to see this group grow and would like suggestions on how to improve the meeting. The following talks were suggested for future meetings. February 2015 Janet CSIRT to talk about advanced Cyber stuff and how Janet interact with the government CERT. Include information on what new services Janet will be delivering in this area. May 2015 - Janet frameworks October 2015 - Software defined storage There was no further business. Page 5 of 5