ACADEMIA

Transition from UNC-Chapel Hill to Core of N.C. Research Network Provides Cost Savings, Spurs Innovation and New Partnerships: ibiblio.org, one of the oldest World Wide Web Internet sites and one of the largest digital libraries used by millions of people, is now being served to the world through the N.C. Research and Education Network (NCREN) Data Center at MCNC. The move, which began last fall, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the hub of NCREN at MCNC in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park was not noticeable to the users who make an average of 14 million information requests each day, but founder Paul Jones said they will take note of improvements enabled in the future. “People who go to ibiblio will only see better performance and better response.” Jones said. “The move enables a reduction in operating expenses while also providing new opportunities for stronger research relationships, more innovative networking solutions and experiments, more economic hosting, better opportunities for expansion and access to better bandwidth availability and pricing.” NCREN leverages FrameNet service from the National LambdaRail (NLR) to provide transport for ibiblio traffic to the most competitive Internet pricing markets. Jones said MCNC provided imaginative solutions for Internet bandwidth along with extremely reliable hosting far above industry standards. “We are delighted to be working with an innovative group like MCNC,” he said. NCREN is offering a service-oriented solution to support both its mission to operate one of the nation’s finest production networks and ibiblio’s mission to serve North Carolina universities and collaborate nationally and internationally, serving millions of people as a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. “ibiblio was faced with constraints on the services they could offer to their community through the bandwidth available at their previous campus location. There was a bottleneck, and we are providing ibiblio the ability to expand to meet the needs of their community,” said Joel Dunn, director of IT and Data Center Services at MCNC. The data center services are available to other NCREN customers. “Since our inception almost 15 years ago, we have always been focused on innovative use of content and technology,” said Jones, who is a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications and School of Information and Library Science. “MCNC and NCREN share that commitment of involvement with emerging technology. ibiblio, like NCREN, is committed to being at the forefront of the Internet technology curve.” ibiblio serves users throughout the world, including the education and research community through NCREN’s connections to the National LambdaRail and Internet2. “We provide content to a huge, diverse audience – not just high performance computing and research groups,” Jones said. “We reach everyone from grandmothers doing genealogy research to elementary and high school students. If companies want access to the best open source software, they can get it faster from us than anybody else.”