Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network

Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand Ltd

Abbreviation	REANNZ
Formation	September 2005
Legal status	Crown-owned company
Purpose	To establish and operate the Advanced Network in order to promote education, research and innovation for the benefit of New Zealand
Headquarters	Wellington, New Zealand
Region served	New Zealand
Chair of the Board of Directors	Jim Donovan
Main organ	Board of Directors
Website	reannz.co.nz

The Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN), now known simply as the REANNZ Network, is a high-capacity, ultra high-speed national research and education network (NREN) connecting New Zealand's tertiary institutions, research organisations, libraries, schools and museums, and the rest of the world. REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand Ltd), a Crown-owned not-for-profit company, owns and operates KAREN.

Commissioned in late 2006, KAREN links to other established regional and national research and education networks, notably to JANET in the UK and to the Pacific Northwest Gigapop in Seattle.

New Zealand researchers and educators can use KAREN to participate in e-research:

KAREN aims:

KAREN consists of a high-speed optical network connecting points of presence (PoPs) throughout New Zealand. A PoP provides an interconnection point between member sites around the network. Members may connect at one or more POPs. KAREN links universities and Crown Research Institutes within New Zealand via Vodafone fibre-optic cable and Vocus Communications, at speeds of 10 gigabits per second. Development with the use of Infinera platforms will soon see 40 to 100Gbit/s backbones between many major PoPs.

International links to Sydney and to Seattle (Pacific Northwest Gigapop) via the Southern Cross Cable connect KAREN to other national research and education networks in Australia and the United States, and through them to Asia and Europe, at 100Gbit/s for Research and Education traffic.

A distinguishing feature of any NREN is its flexibility to meet the diverse needs of all its users. The numbers involved, coupled with increasing sophistication of personal applications, mean that managing demand and maintaining performance require the use of a hybrid Ethernet and Internet Protocol (IP) network architecture.

The research community, driven by the development of various e-science grids, has developed large-scale applications that will individually use high amounts of bandwidth and can in some cases also have strict demands on the network that may require defined resources allocated temporarily to meet performance demands.