TERENA celebrates 25th anniversary with a view to the future

TERENA celebrates 25th anniversary with a view to the future

On 13 June, 2011, TERENA celebrates its 25 year anniversary as the association of national research and education networking organisations (NRENs) in Europe. TERENA looks back at an eventful history - many new concepts have been introduced within the TERENA community, including middleware and customer-owned dark fibre as well as the development and launch of eduroam.

With an eye to the future, TERENA marked its contribution to collaboration in the research networking community with a contest in which participants were asked to predict how the Internet will impact people’s lives in the next 25 years. A challenging future lies ahead for the community, with mobility, cloud services and lambda networking becoming increasingly important. TERENA looks forward to offering its members and the wider research networking community a forum in which to address these and other challenges together.

History of TERENA

TERENA was founded under the name RARE (Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne) on 13 June 1986. The first few years were dominated by the COSINE (Co-operation for Open Systems Interconnection Networking in Europe) project. COSINE led to the implementation of some of the first standardised network-related services, for example email. It also created the first generation of the backbone network interconnecting the national research networks in Europe, known today as GÉANT. To run the European backbone, RARE’s Operational Unit was later split off from the association under the name DANTE.

In the years that followed, IP (Internet Protocol) became the dominant protocol in data networking, leading to the creation of the RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) Network Coordination Centre in 1992 by RARE, and later to the set-up of the RIPE NCC as a separate legal entity. In October 1994, RARE took over the assets of EARN (European Academic and Research Network), providing the financial basis to rebuild the organisation. Since then, RARE has been known by its current name TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association.

Development throughout the years

Many new concepts were introduced to the European networking community at TERENA events. In 2000, TERENA organised the first-ever European middleware workshop, and by doing so, brought the concept of middleware to European networking collaboration. Middleware quickly became imperative to the TERENA community, which continues to this day. At the TERENA Networking Conference in 2001, the concept of customer-owned dark fibre networks was presented, opening up a new era in research networking with practically unlimited network capacities at affordable costs. TERENA also hosted the first International Lambda Workshop in 2001, starting a series of events that led to the creation of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) collaboration on optical networking three years later. In 2003, eduroam was set up as a pilot project under the auspices of TERENA’s TF-Mobility. eduroam marks TERENA’s first success in the area of roaming and mobile networking, and has since been deployed as a service in all European countries and beyond.

Services have become increasingly important to NRENs in recent years, and this shift can be seen in the number of services in TERENA’s activity portfolio. TERENA Secretary General, Karel Vietsch explains, “eduroam is a worldwide success, but the TERENA Certificate Service and the Trusted Introducer service are popular, too, and growing in importance. In fact, these services in the middleware and security area received the highest ratings of all TERENA activities recently in our community satisfaction survey.”

Meeting new challenges

The coming years will be a time of dynamic change where the TERENA community must continue to collaboratively adapt to new challenges and respond to new priorities. Mobility is one such challenge. Using a range of mobile devices, researchers, teachers and students are demanding seamless access to their professional information environment. New technologies and new forms of collaboration with commercial providers such as 3G and 4G network operators will be critical in addressing these needs. Commercial companies offering research and education institutions large-scale cloud computing and storage and other services are also putting pressure on the TERENA membership to deploy new business models. The challenges associated with lambda networking will be another focus of further development in the future. Open lambda exchanges offer new ways for research institutions to exchange large amounts of data with each other and with organisations outside the research community, bringing both threats and opportunities to NRENs.

“As we look ahead, we can expect the future to be as eventful as the 25 years’ history behind us,” concludes Karel Vietsch.

Fuente: http://www.terena.org/news/fullstory.php?news_id=2922&pearmail=1