N3 Janet Gateway - currently supporting sessions initiated in N3
Resilient Operational N3 Janet Gateway Service
Summary
The dedicated and resilient Gateway between N3 and Janet takes all the data transfer between the two networks instead of the N3 internet gateway. This gives 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. It should be noted that the Gateway currently will only support sessions initiated on N3 that are accessing services on Janet (i.e. with a Janet IP address). The N3 Janet Gateway Phase 2 Project has been working to extend the use of the N3 Janet Gateway to support sessions initiated in Janet where access is approved and authorised for access to N3.
N3 Janet Gateway Service
The N3 JANET Gateway service is a jointly funded initiative between the Department of Health and Janet(UK). The main initial benefit of the N3 Janet Gateway service was a much improved response to University web services accessed from N3. This was because at that point the N3 internet gateway was highly overloaded through much of the day whereas the dedicated N3 Janet Gateway has sufficient capacity to avoid any contention, and although the N3 internet gateway has been developed significantly since then it is still an advantage to have the dedicated link for Janet.. The design of the N3 Janet 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 the service.
The N3 Janet Gateway is resilient with the usually active link in London and the usually standby back-up link in Manchester. Both links have been implemented with sufficient bandwidth capacity (200 Mbps) to easily meet current needs and also cope with the additional demand anticipated as a result of increasing collaboration between practitioners in health, research and education.
For those in research and education who want to set access rules by IP address, then traffic flowing from N3 through the N3 Janet Gateway will appear from these address ranges (following NAT from private IP addresses on N3 to public IP addresses at the Gateway):
Kingston -194.176.105.96/29
Manchester 194.176.105.104/29
The contract for the N3 Janet Gateway is for for 5 years, so currently runs to June 2015. The contract for N3 itself will end in 2014 although there is up to 3 years for a transition to new arrangements. Janet are working closely with the N3 reprocurement project, Public Service Network for Health (PSNH) to ensure a smooth transition.
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.
Further Development
The new N3 Janet Gateway was expected to provide a platform for further development in improved support for joint working in clinical research and education. 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.
Adding to the functionality of the N3 Janet Gateway, particularly to support bi-directional working that includes support for sessions initiated in Janet, was the objective of the N3 Janet Gateway Phase 2 Project although this has now been overtaken by events. However there is the potential alternative of the N3 Remote Access for Non-NHS Users product - N3 Janet Gateway Phase 2 Project for more
N3 is the broadband network for the NHS in England and Scotland. It should therefore be noted that separate arrangements are needed for NHS-HE connectivity in Wales, through the Public Services Broadband Aggregation (PSBA) initiative. Northern Ireland also outside N3.
For further information contact Malcolm.Teague@ja.net .
