Campus Best Practices

Overview & Synopsis

This presentation summarizes the experiences and results that so far are achieved in the GÉANT task “Campus Best Practices” (GN3/NA3/T4). The overall objective of this task is to address key challenges for European campus networks, organise working groups and provide an evolving and to-the-point set of best-practice documents for the community. An important goal is to harmonise NREN functionality with the campus networks and thus provide viable end user services. Four NRENs are contributing to this work; UNINETT from Norway, CSC/Funet from Finland, CESNET from the Czech Republic and AMRES from Serbia. Work started in April 2009 and the working methods build upon experiences from the Norwegian GigaCampus project (2006-2009) and are coherent with the findings of the EARNEST study (2006-2007). Based on experiences from the four participating countries this paper gives recommendations on how a national “Campus Best Practices” effort could be organized. A staircase of 6 steps is proposed, where each step requires a gradually stronger NREN commitment on campus. The steps are: - Organise workshops to share campus network experiences - Set up working groups to discuss campus best practices - Develop your own national campus best practices - Run common national procurements - Do active counselling on campus - Assist with implementations on campus 2.5 years into the project each participating country has operational working groups that all are producing national best practices. These documents are in turn translated to English and published. Currently 31 documents from six different areas are available. The areas are: physical infrastructure, campus networking, mobility, security, network monitoring and real-time communications.