How NEREN Uses Internet2 Insight Console and the Managed Dedicated Local Platform to Strengthen Regional Connectivity

Rob Vietzke: NEREN — short for the North East Research and Education Network — is a consortium founded by the R&E networks throughout New England and New York. When we started 25 years ago, our state networks were small, and connecting to New York City and Boston was a shared challenge. Now, several of our state R&E networks are quite expansive, but NEREN still plays a critical role in connecting the state networks with each other, global R&E networks, and critical facilities like the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, Mass.

Rob Vietzke: The Managed Dedicated Local Platform enables NEREN to stay lean while offering the same advanced capabilities as much larger organizations to meet emerging community needs. 

As a regional interconnect for our state network members, NEREN has been an optical-only transport platform since it first went online. In the past few years, we recognized a growing need for cloud connectivity, more distributed access to the Internet2 network in the region, and advanced capabilities like those available through Insight Console. Internet2 already offers these services and capabilities on its platform with abundant spare capacity in many of the locations where we need it. Therefore, it made sense to share resources where possible and invest in new sites only where necessary. 

For an organization with part-time staffing like NEREN, MDLP also allows us to leverage existing community staffing at Internet2, so we do not need to add staff for the new services. Simply, NEREN would have had to become a much more robust organization to do these services in-house; collaborating with Internet2 provided an opportunity to avoid not only duplicating hardware, but also staffing.

Rob Vietzke: Internet2’s multi-year investment in Insight Console was a major enabler for NEREN to envision MDLP as a shared service. Insight Console allows our members to manage their services directly and in real time, increasing their ability to rapidly deploy services and reducing reliance on NEREN staff expertise. We’re too small to have an in-house software development team to undertake anything like this. Together with at-scale feature development by Internet2’s software team, MDLP unifies campuses and regional, national, and cloud resources. It is a real game changer.”

Rob Vietzke: Actually, the question is an interesting one that shows how collaborative this arrangement is. Although the users are NEREN’s customers, they interact directly with the Internet2-supported Insight Console. We have little visibility into what they are using it for unless we make an effort to ask. We do see a lot of activity in setting up direct connections to cloud providers across the membership. Those connections are not just for the big universities, but also for smaller schools, state and local government, and healthcare organizations. There is a wide range of utilization.

Insight Console has also proven helpful in isolating potential trouble areas on the network and confirming routing security concerns.

Rob Vietzke: As we consider the next era of advanced networking, it seems reasonable to anticipate that many of the innovations will be in the software and support systems that wrap around our network fiber and hardware. This is something the R&E community and Internet2 envisioned when we all pushed for a software-defined network platform. Being all in on the community’s investment in Insight Console and Internet2’s Next Generation Infrastructure provides strategic opportunities to work as a community on this software — and to maintain and accelerate community leadership in advanced networking. 

I am hopeful that the Managed Dedicated Local Platform and Insight Console approach will see additional adoption among R&E networks across the nation. It has already been a portfolio changer for NEREN, and we are just beginning to realize its full benefits.