Media release

International connectivity

“REANNZ warmly welcomes the Government’s initiative to invest in additional international telecommunications capacity to meet the future needs of the research and education sector. This will provide a step-change in opportunities for the KAREN community to collaborate and innovate”, said Donald Clark, REANNZ Chief Executive, today after the Government budget announcements.

KAREN project fund recipients announced

5 projects will receive total funding of $785,000 from the Capability Build Project Fund. The successful projects take full advantage of KAREN's capabilities, and will accelerate collaboration, skill development, and the use of KAREN.

Issue 6 of our newsletter hyphen is out now bringing you news, reviews and information on KAREN and the successes of our members.

On a recent trip to the US Donald Clark was invited by Vint Serf, Chief Internet evangelist at Google, to present at a Google tech talk session on the opportunities and challenges faced by KAREN and the research and education community in New Zealand.

Saturday 15 December marked the first-year anniversary of KAREN.

University of Auckland eResearch Director and KAREN champion Paul Bonnington is crossing the ditch to take up the Directorship of Monash University eResearch Centre.

KAREN has been named as one of two finalists in the TUANZ Next Generation Fibre-Optic Network Award category of the TUANZ Innovation Awards 2007.

Information about the KAREN awards - acknowledging members of the KAREN community who have made an outstanding contribution to KAREN - is now available on our website.

KAREN users Chris Brown and Mik Black from the University of Otago featured - along with KAREN itself - on Radio New Zealand National's Our Changing World programme this Thursday, 28 of June.

The progamme will be available as a stream for the coming month at the Radio New Zealand website.  It is also available as a podacast.  (Programme length 12'31'')

REANNZ is a relatively new Crown Company providing innovative, leading edge technology to both national and international research ers, educators and innovators.

The primary KAREN VLAN was changed to support a 9000 byte IP MTU on Tuesday, 26 June.  This change allows members to take advantage of the low latency, high bandwidth characteristics of KAREN to achieve greater data throughput than conventional networks permit.  This is achieved without impacting the support for existing traffic.

KAREN members have already been taking advantage of the possibilities that this change allows. Ben Yeldon of AUT and Craig Miskell of AgResearch have performed some initial testing.

"Testing has shown a 3-fold increase in overall throughput when using large (4000byte+) frames vs 1500byte frames", says Craig.

This performance gain was seen without performing any tuning of the systems involved.

Two exciting and unique positions have been created at REANNZ as a result of our latest strategic planning exercise:

Several network access providers have enquired about the possibility of providing aggregation services, ie sharing a core KAREN connection with more than one end customer.  Such a service can be useful where customers do not have the funding available to purchase a 1Gb/s last mile connection or the required equipment to deal with the routing and other specifications of a core KAREN connection. 

REANNZ has created a new ‘Enabled by KAREN’ logo for use by KAREN member organisations.

Trip Report: APAN23 Manila, January 2003

Donald Clark and Julie Watson from REANNZ and Paul Bonnington from University of Auckland attended the 23rd Asia Pacific Advanced Networks meeting in Manila.  The meeting offered a chance to:

Development work on Phase 2 of the KAREN website is underway. The key development is the creation of community specific 'sub- sites' providing KAREN communities with their own online space. You will also see some changes to the main site, including the redesign of the homepage and the addition of a photo gallery.

REANNZ staff were fortunate to undertake two international trips during 2006.

Annual Tertiary IT Conference, 12-14 September 2006, Christchurch, NZ

I attended the first day of the Annual Tertiary IT Conference (http://www.tertiaryitconference.co.nz/).  It was well attended with about 70 delegates; a mix of vendors and IT staff from the Tertiary Education Institutes (TEIs), most of the Universities and some Industry Training Oganisations. John Buckler, conference host, had organised a good mix of speakers, breakout sessions, roundtables and plenary sessions over the 3 days. I gave an overview presentation on KAREN, the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network.

REANNZ Chief Executive,  Donald Clark, appointed Councillor of InternetNZ for a three-year term.

KAREN video conference trial participants are making the most of this service and simplifying real-time collaboration. Are you taking advantage of this fantastic service?