United Arab Emirates

Ankabut, one of the leading NRENs in the Arab region, started in 2002 as an idea which became to reality in 2006 when the five public institutions in UAE (Khalifa University, Zayed University, UAE University, Institute of Applied Technology and Higher College of Technology) signed the MoU to establish Ankabut, then they assigned the role to Khalifa University to develop the network, which was built on the ground in 2009. Now, Ankabut has 6 PoPs and 25 links started in 2009 with 10 GB backbone network and 1 GB access for each campus. The network is MPLS enabled and dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 since the first day. It provides access via its advanced 6 Core routers (10Gb) backbone and 56 access routers (1Gb). This connects to a High Performance Computing Cluster of 10 TFlops at Khalifa University. Ankabut is a host of 60-core CPU running gLite middleware for grid computing and a 64 Cores High Performance Computing Cluster of 1.2 TFlops over the Cloud.

Locally, there is a growth in the network where now Ankabut has 100 sites connected to Ankabut as well as K12 schools and 28 public and private institutions are connected to Ankabut. Also, it has a target to connect all the schools of the Ministry of Higher Education by end of 2015, and the mandate is to connect 400 schools in the northern Emirates in UAE. For the international connectivity, It links for international collaboration with other research network such as the US Internet2 and the European GÉANT. Ankabut is also supporting the AGE-OX PoP at Fujairah.

 

In 2009, Ankabut started four basic services, the network basic services and other services such as HPC, Learning Management System and Library Management System. Right now, Ankabut’s portfolio services is growing very fast, they have the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as a service, MOZON which is the Ankabut Cloud, they are offering the members institutions the software and Platform as services, colocation service, they developed the state of the art data centre and also offer the colocation and the disaster recovery services for the universities. Ankabut is hosting EFADA consortium, which is the universities libraries consortium.

 

More information: www.ankabut.ae