Connectivity Revolution: Internet2 and its Bold Transformation Initiative

I’m really rather agnostic about that issue, but these big data flows—you’ve got to be intentional about the way you architect your security regime, to make sure that you look at your own campus’s data flows and security protocols and make sure the big flows are treated differently from little data packets.

The third element involved is software-defined networking, which is a big trend. That means a lot of things to a lot of different people; but what it could be, and where we’re focusing a lot of energy, is… If you think about computing and storage and visualization, and a lot of the work that genomics is involved in, often, the network was a black box. They understood how much data was involved, but in terms of moving the data from one place to another, they didn’t have much knowledge or control; it was a black box. So you want to rethink your network environment, especially when you’re working in the cloud, or when you’re working with some genomics institutes—you’ve got a couple of very large genomics centers inside and outside the country and a couple of large hospital institutes in that area, and coordinating data across those sites is very important.

So we should think about that system-wise, and optimize it together. And the concept of software-defined networking means that the application should be aware of what resources, including the network, that are available to finish the job for the user, and the network should be programmable and controllable by the application. This is a little bit farther out there than network abundance or “science DMZ.” But if we’re really going to do widespread genomics worldwide, we’re going to need to the network to be more adaptable.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where are you now?

I think with regard to the capabilities that are available nationally through a network like Internet2 today, are probably a 9. We’ve got a 100-gigabit national backbone that’s available to every state and that can quickly go to 88 times that, to 8.8 terabits. And it’s fully configurable and ready to go. When we built this in part with the help of a stimulus program from the ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act], using the network doesn’t change the cost. So we’re ready to go in terms of supporting these capabilities and use cases.

So they need to catch up to your capabilities?

Yes, absolutely. So we feel really good about that. And in terms of supporting the applications for genomic science, this thing is ready to go. And when you start thinking about hundreds of thousands of sequencers (personal sequencers), and potentially millions and millions of gene sequences a year that you want to compare and contrast to one another, we’ve got work to do to set that up. But in terms of supporting the current state of the art, we’re in really good shape.

You’ve been collaborating with Brocade, correct?

Yes, the folks at Brocade [the San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade, a network solutions provider] have been  part of the solution on a couple of fronts. One is that they get this importance of creating the 100-gig market. So they’ve really invested in the idea of bandwidth abundance, by the way they’ve air-conditioned their products; they’re also heavily invested in working on software-defined networking.

What should CIOs and CMIOs be thinking about all this, as Internet2 develops and evolves forward?

They may not feel they can relate to all of this, but I actually think that what we do in Internet2 is a collaborative community of folks, and that that is a very common theme in healthcare. When folks go to clinical meetings and talk about rare findings and such, what we do is very much the same. And helping to enable the IT workers to think collaboratively, could be really helpful in transforming that part of the discipline in the next few years. Plus, this is fun to do!