Last month, Belnet increased the capacity of its primary connection to GÉANT to 100 Gbit/s. The upgrade is part of a general review of the external connectivity of our network. Its implementation has been accelerated in order to respond better to the needs of one of our affiliated research centres.
The Belnet network has been affiliated with the GÉANT European research and education network since 2001. As a result, the over 200 organisations in our community have a high-performance connection with other research and educational institutions worldwide.
Increasingly more data
International cooperation has become the norm in the research sector. That generates a huge increase in data traffic .This is something that Belnet not only sees via its monitoring systems, but also in the concrete questions from our partners in the research sector. One of these partners is the Inter-University Institute for High Energies (IIHE), a research centre linked to the Brussels universities VUB and ULB. Scientists at the IIHE and their colleagues at the University of Antwerp and Ghent University analyse on the computers of the research center masses of data coming from the CERN and other sources. That amount of data is rising exponentially, year after year. The IIHE, which is connected to the Belnet network via the VUB, came up against the limits of its research bandwidth. An upgrade was absolutely necessary to be able to further expand its activities in the future. Our teams examined this question in a larger strategic cooperation project between the VUB, the ULB, and Belnet.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world, at CERN
100 G connection to GÉANT
In order to provide the IIHE with additional research bandwidth, it was necessary for Belnet to first upgrade our connection to the GÉANT network. The upgrade was already in the pipelines, but was implemented faster so that we could better respond to our customer’s needs. Thanks to the smooth partnership with GÉANT, Belnet is now connected to the European research network at 100 Gbit/s. In the coming months, our network engineers will also increase the capacity of the redundant link. As a result of the upgrade, Belnet is ready to provide more bandwidth to other research centres as well. The organisations that make use of the ExpressRoute will also benefit from the improved connection to GÉANT. They use this link to connect directly to MS Azure.Ready for the future
And the result for IIHE? They’ll soon have 20 G of research bandwidth, as well as a separate virtual network for commercial bandwidth. This will allow the centre to continue to carry out pioneering research into the physics of elementary particles in the future.Did you find this news interesting?