2021 Initiatives
Partnering with Link Oregon and Michigan Statewide Education Network
2021 saw GlobalNOC sign new contracts with two organizations: Link Oregon and Michigan’s Merit Network.
Link Oregon is a nonprofit consortium providing high-speed, resilient, fiber broadband connectivity to Oregon’s public and nonprofit sectors. GlobalNOC responded to the group’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for a sector-specific network operations center to provide 24×7×365 operational support and on-call support services. GlobalNOC won the award and entered into an agreement in March 2021. Since then, we have established monitoring and measurement services, as well as service desk support.
In June 2021, GlobalNOC signed a contract with Merit to help manage and monitor the Michigan Statewide Education Network as they bring high-bandwidth connectivity to all of Michigan’s K-12 students. Despite having their own management tools, Merit sought GlobalNOC’s experience and expertise to augment their existing capabilities, specifically in network performance measurement, monitoring, and visualization. Since the turnup of services, we’ve successfully built out a model of the MISEN network, established monitoring and measurement services, and are working to complete integrations between our systems and their ticketing and IT service management tools.
New structure builds on successes, strengthens partnerships
In 2021, GlobalNOC implemented organizational changes to better serve our partners and foster excellence in the research and education network realm. The new structure and priorities will enable us to continue our decades of success, while positioning our teams to more efficiently and effectively work together to meet the needs of their partners.
“These changes will help GlobalNOC continue to grow, to strengthen our partnerships, and to drive excellence in delivering network operations services to support research, education, and the public interest,” said David E. Jent, IU associate vice president for networks. “We are confident that these changes will serve the GlobalNOC and our partners well now and into the future.”
Getting underway with automation
We embarked on automation efforts in network engineering, focusing on device configurations, and in systems, focusing on streamlining. We supplemented these efforts with a new automation program that examines our operations, holistically, to bring efficiency and better-quality service to other areas of the GlobalNOC.
To keep our automation efforts moving forward, in 2021 we created and filled a new automation engineer position. We want to make the methods we use to build and deploy our software quicker, more effective, and more reliable—which in turn improves the resiliency and availability of our services. The best way to do all of these things is by building systems that automate these processes.
We envision multiple projects in this area over the coming years. Our first effort involves automatic investigation of alarms. When a certain alarm profile is raised, we envision the system automatically collecting pertinent information for inclusion in the ticket for examination by our staff during their “first look.”
Upgrading OSHEAN’s layer 2 network
Two GlobalNOC network engineers lent their expertise to a project improving the Ocean State Higher Education Economic Development and Administrative Network (OSHEAN). They helped the OSHEAN project team upgrade their layer 2 network with hardware supporting Ethernet VPN and segment routing. The GlobalNOC engineers assisted with database needs, device monitoring, configuration consistency, software upgrades, and in building configuration documentation and templates.
To do this, the engineers used commonly available tools such as Ansible roles and automation platforms hosted by the GlobalNOC systems team. These tools allowed for the streamlining of processes that required touching many devices. By streamlining these processes, it was possible to reduce errors, speed deployment, ensure consistency of configurations, and prepare for operational simplicity.
Rolling out the DB’s next-gen user interface
The GlobalNOC Network Management Database—colloquially known as “the DB”—sits at the center of our tools and services ecosystem. After a decade of service, its user interface needed an update.
Building on our long history of providing opportunities to up-and-coming developers, we created a team of student employees to act as a “strike force” to experiment with new technologies and develop new implementations of existing tools—all under the guidance of our leadership and senior engineering staff.
The student team had already established their talents by performing a complete re-implementation of the user interface of IU’s Campus Networking Portal (CNP). Building on the success of that project, the software and systems engineering leadership team decided to give the student team a shot at re-writing the GlobalNOC Database Web UI using modern technologies. They made improvements, resolved technical challenges, and established new standards that we can leverage in the future as we develop new applications and continue to evolve existing ones.
Focusing on fair and transparent prioritization
Customers’ network needs are at the heart of everything we do at GlobalNOC. Whether it’s fulfilling feature requests, improving existing functionality, fixing bugs, or building new tools and services, we strive to be on it, at all times.
Of course, we are limited in what we can do and how quickly we can do it. To help, in 2021 we rolled out a new focus on fair and transparent prioritization.
Our progress includes 1) creating the “top 10” prioritization project, where we’ve worked with customers to identify the issues that are most important to them, so we can focus our efforts in the short to medium term, and 2) developing a ticketing portal to give customers more direct visibility into the systems and software tickets that they’ve opened with us.
Connecting with our team and clients
Over the past year, we have hosted or begun a number of initiatives designed to deepen our connections with each other, and with our customers.
We began hosting monthly Pizza Talks for staff to gather over the lunch hour and informally learn about projects from their colleagues. We hosted a fall picnic for our staff members to enjoy the beautiful scenery of southern Indiana while playing cornhole and snacking on tasty treats.
In October, we held our third annual members meeting, now known as GlobalNOC Connects, over Zoom. The free event was a chance for our members to build community, give feedback on GlobalNOC processes and operations, and present and receive training on a variety of R&E networking topics.
We also rebooted the GlobalNOC User Group, which is an opportunity for our customers to meet and discuss upcoming changes, trends in our industries, and to share best practices.