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Telkom to network country's research institutions

By March 2010, a dedicated 10 Gbps national fibre network will link South Africa’s foremost research universities. The project will launch the country as a global seat of networked research, backed by accessible high-performance computing and massive data storage.

Grand vision

 The Department of Science and Technology’s National Cyber Infrastructure vision, an initiative of grand scope and ambition, is aimed at providing an ICT backbone to support and stimulate South African research. It encompasses a host of projects under three primary programmes – the South African National Research Network (SANReN), the Centre for High- Performance Computing (CHPC) and the Very Large Database (VLDB) storage programme.

The CSIR’s Meraka Institute is responsible for implementing and managing SANReN and CHPC. The latter was launched as far back as May 2007, but it took another two years of negotiation and briefings before Meraka awarded the contract for SANReN’s provision to Telkom in July 2009. The network will ultimately allow the research community to engage in meaningful online collaboration (networked research) and link them to international bandwidth, explains Geoff Daniell, project consultant, SANReN project.

Kagiso Chikane, CHPC centre manager for the Meraka Institute, adds: “SANReN will give institutions access to facilities such as the CHPC in Cape Town, enable a national computing grid and allow for large volumes of data transfer among institutions – typically a requirement of the research community. Of immediate relevance is its importance in supporting South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array [SKA] bid to host the world’s most powerful radio telescope.”

Phase 1 and 2

The national rollout of SANReN amounts to its second phase. Neotel, the country’s second fixed-lined operator, provided Phase 1 in March 2008, in the form of a 10Gbps metropolitan ring network linking Wits University, the University of Johannesburg (UJ), two of UJ’s satellite campuses, and the CSIR’s Pretoria campus to one another and to a major gateway site in Johannesburg. Teams from UJ and Wits, Meraka, the Tertiary Education Network (Tenet) and Neotel worked closely together to accomplish this seminal feat, notes Christiaan Kuun, SANReN project manager at the Meraka Institute.

Then Telkom came on board to provide Phase 2. In parallel with Phase 2, the Johannesburg network will be replicated in Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban – and later on, in ‘second-tier’ urban centres such as Port Elizabeth, East London and Bloemfontein. Telkom’s task is to inter-link all these centres via a 10Gbps national fibre optic backbone network. The telco’s national coverage, its experience and its capacity to deliver a dedicated country-wide NGN at beneficial pricing are what got it the deal, says Kuun. Pure and unstructured

Daniell says Meraka specified dedicated (unstructured), unmanaged bandwidth, accessed via next-generation Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interfaces. While no network management was required, Telkom is responsible for maintaining the service by way of normal fault reporting procedures.

A once-off upfront payment was made for the infrastructure, which supports both 1Gbps and 10Gbps services for a 10-year term. The fee included installation charges. The DST grant specified that no recurring costs were to be incurred, among other tough public finance management criteria, says Daniell.

Challenges

Some noteworthy challenges presented themselves early on in the national project, adds Danielle. “Firstly, the regulatory environment did not afford us much choice in terms of the operators we could work with. As a government agency, the CSIR prefers using a spread of providers, as is evident in its use of Neotel on a regional basis, Telkom for the national portion, and Seacom on an international basis.”

Secondly, the project required a shift in mindset within the research and telecoms industry – from accepting bandwidth limitations to thinking outside the box, as it were. “It took many hours of presentation before we felt our requirement was fully appreciated,” says Daniell.

Thirdly, he notes, the sudden deluge of bandwidth to universities required re-thinking the way such centres are networked and protected, inside and out. And lastly, the challenge of affordability loomed large. “Globally, the average cost of bandwidth is in the region of $4 per Megabit per second per month,” says Daniell. “In South Africa it is still many thousands of rands.”

Game-changing impact

But Telkom’s network turned out to be very cost-competitive to users. Firstly, Meraka is not required to recoup the capital cost of the network from users, only its running and replacement cost. Secondly, Tenet’s participation in the project as a bulk-buying agent of bandwidth for tertiary institutions will make the exercise much more costcompetitive. And thirdly, with the pledge of Seacom, another SANReN partner, to provide low-cost international bandwidth, high-bandwidth research has just become a lot more viable.

In other ways, the SANReN network will prove a game-changer for the research community. At the time of writing, the impact was still limited to some CSIR, University of Johannesbur, and University of the Witwatersrand campus initiatives, and the NRF’s radio astronomy site in Hartebeesthoek. In future, research efficiencies throughout the country will improve by many hundreds of percent, especially when international bandwidth is part of the package. Daniell recounts the story of the academic from Polokwane who, for want of access to supercomputing capabilities, used to have to travel regularly to Cape Town, by car, with hard drives in his boot. As SANReN takes shape, thousands of academics will have no more need of that.

“Future plans for SANReN include the provision of high capacity links via Broadband Infraco on the West African Cable System (WACS), due for completion in 2011. Broadband Infraco is a tier-1 shareholder in WACS. Connectivity via the east and west coast systems will ensure international connectivity redundancy for SANReN,” states Daniell All this adds up to a significant wind change for the local academic community. Developing nations seldom get involved in networked research since capacity (notably communications infrastructure) is costly. For instance, the earth imaging project that the CSIR is now undertaking as a result of SANReN, requires downloading 10 Gigabytes of data daily from NASA. “When SANReN is in place, complete with the international portion via Seacom, local research can engage in data transfer of extremely high orders of magnitude,” Daniell concludes.

Build it and…

The network’s future needs were considered to be equally crucial, he says. “We wanted the network to be expandable to accommodate future demand. The first ‘future’ project on the SANReN radar screen is SKA, if the country’s bid is successful. With SKA, the talk is of speeds of hundreds of Gigabits per second.”

The expectation is that, once the backbone is built to enough capacity, academics and projects will come in their droves, making the investment viable. In other countries, similar investments have encouraged and stimulated further research and development, which in turn stimulated economic growth.

All clear

The parties agree that successes outnumber the challenges, and that the future looks bright for SANReN and the association between Telkom and the CSIR. Godfrey Ntoele, Telkom’s Group Executive for National Sales and Marketing Operations, says: “We are pleased to count the CSIR as one of our most valued customers, alongside the likes of Absa, the IEC and FIFA. That such a diverse array of customers has chosen to work with us attests to our growing reputation as a trusted adviser, tailoring solutions based on the specific needs of individual customers. This is complemented by our capacity to deliver next-generation network solutions based on leading-edge technologies, along with support functions from our National Network Operations Centre in Centurion.”

Kuun says the future bodes well for the Telkom-CSIR relationship. “It is a very healthy partnership. We will continue to make use of their services, as we are always in need of new and augmented solutions, whenever the offer is within budget and specification.”

C O N T A C T

Christiaan Kuun

SANReN Project Manager, CSIR
Tel: 012 841 2876
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.csir.co.za

Nonku Dlamini

Executive: Government Sales, Telkom
Tel: 012 680 7172
E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.telkom.co.za

PICTURE

Godfrey Ntoele, Telkom Group executive, national sales and marketing operations