Resilient Operational N3 JANET Gateway Service
N3 JANET Gateway Goes Live
This new dedicated and resilient Gateway between N3 and JANET will take all the data transfer between the two networks instead of the N3 internet gateway. This will mean quicker and more responsive access for N3 users such as students on clinical placement and NHS staff who work closely with Universities on teaching and research. The service went live at the end of June 2010, helping users on N3 access services on JANET at organisations such as Universities, Further Education Colleges and schools.
New N3 JANET Gateway Service
The new N3 JANET Gateway service went live on 24th June 2010 in a jointly funded initiative between the Department of Health and JANET(UK), the organisation that runs JANET on behalf of the education and research community in the UK. The main initial benefit of the new N3 JANET Gateway service will be a much improved response to University web services accessed from N3. The design of the Gateway infrastructure ensures that all N3 traffic for JANET will be routed correctly and will not use the N3 internet gateway. It remains a local NHS organisation responsibility to ensure that use is appropriate through local information governance arrangements. Local organisations should review their own local access agreements to take full advantage of this new service.
The new full N3 JANET Gateway service was developed after more than two years experience with an early adopter N3 JANET Gateway that served access to selected specific JANET connected organisations. The new service is resilient with a link in London and a back-up link in Manchester. Both Gateways have been implemented with sufficient bandwidth capacity to easily meet current needs and also cope with the additional demand anticipated as a result of increasing collaboration between practitioners in health, education and research.
Examples
The N3 JANET gateway is a critical link to enable connectivity for the University’s student and staff based in remote NHS Trusts. It is important that this link is both robust and resilient” says Martin van Eker at the University of Bristol Medical School. Martin has been involved in this project from the start and helped test the new Gateway. He has a keen interest as the Bristol medical students are fully based in the clinical academies at 8 NHS Trusts across Somerset, Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire in years 3 to 5 of their course.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute collect anonymised chromosomal anomaly data direct from NHS clinicians and input this into their DECIPHER database. Without the N3 JANET Gateway it was becoming very difficult for the clinicians to do this and support was being lost. Involvement in the early adopter Gateway took this problem away and now resilience has been added as an extra advantage with the new Gateway.
The University of York has been working under contract to help support Primary Care Trusts across England with the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme. It is critical for Primary Care and Mental Health Services that connectivity to the University servers is reliable and resilient.
Future
The new N3 JANET Gateway will provide a platform for further development in improved support for joint working in clinical education and research. This is part of a wider commitment to ensure that the N3 and JANET communities are properly able to access applications and content on other public-sector networks. The present development is an important step along this path. Officials from both the NHS Technology Office and JANET(UK) continue to work with the Cabinet Office Public Sector Network (PSN) team in realising a shared goal: seamless and cost-effective high-bandwidth interconnectivity between all public-sector networks across the UK.
N3 is the broadband network for the NHS in England and ScotlandFor further information contact Malcolm.Teague@ja.net .
National Forum
