Visit to E2BN Core

Above: Easynet core

On 22nd August 2007, seven delegates from Norfolk and Cambridgeshire local authorities took the opportunity to visit Easynet's hosting facility and operations centre located in the heart of London. This visit followed up on an invitation made by E2BN's Internet Service Provider at a previous Technical Group Meeting.

The visiting party which included E2BN's Technical Services Manager were first shown around the Brick Lane data centre. The Brick Lane site comprises 78,000 square feet of highly secure, temperature controlled environment with essential services being duplicated throughout in order to provide a robust and resilient hosting facility. This site is where the E2BN 'core' hardware is located and where all member authorities' education networks connect into in order to access the Internet, E2BN content services, the National Education Network - and each other!

E2BN currently have five standard communications cabinets that house a variety of equipment including: Cisco networking devices, Protex servers, Web Servers, Video-Conferencing gatekeeper and MCU equipment, Firewall devices, DNS servers, Flash-meeting Server and data back-up servers.

The E2BN deployment of Netmedia services is also located here. Following this, the party were joined by a senior member of the Abuse Team to review topics including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and the impact this has had on E2BN and LAs regarding required interaction with local police services.

The Easynet service manager updated the group on a pilot project with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) that would use the Child Abuse Image (CAI) list to report potential illegal access via Education Networks to the relevant authorities. This project is still in its early stages but Easynet confirmed that under existing arrangements, filtering on this list takes place transparently on all web traffic passing through the Easynet internet transit.

Lunch was taken courtesy of Easynet at a Brick Lane curry house and provided a great opportunity for discussion on a variety of topics and for sharing of ideas and working practices between the two LAs. After lunch the group were shown around the new Global Network Operations Centre (GNOC) which monitors Easynet's core and Internet services. Then it was on to see the Fault Management suite where agents deal with incoming support calls from its corporate customers. The group were informed about the way that the various teams are arranged and some of the tools at their disposal.

Easynet have recently introduced a new Remedy fault management system and are introducing ITIL processes in to the fault management function. To round up, the party were briefed about the upcoming launch of Easynet's new Voice-over-IP product range. Thanks to all who took part. We will look at running further visits depending on demand. Simon Bright - E2BN Technical Services Manager.