The Quilt, a national coalition of advanced regional networks for research and education across the country, today announced that a request for proposals (RFP) for the 2018 Commodity Internet Services (CIS) program will open on Jan. 8, 2018. This will mark The Quilt’s 10th RFP effort for the CIS.
One of the goals of The Quilt is to provide cost-effective advanced network services by organizing and leveraging our community demand for services. Toward this goal, the coalition of Quilt members and Authorized Quilt Buyers purchase Commodity Internet Services through several approved CIS providers who are selected through a public RFP process to participate in the program.
The Quilt Community collectively purchases more than 750 Gbps of committed bandwidth from Authorized Quilt Providers established through the CIS program. This is about 200 Gbps more than allocated just two years ago.
Through the RFP process, according to Quilt President and CEO Jen Leasure, the goal is to identify those providers who (through their IP transit Internet service offerings) are willing and able to be partners in the delivery and development of our research and education networks through the United States.
“We will look to our approved CIS providers for pricing discounts appropriate to our levels of bandwidth consumption,” Leasure added. “We seek provider partners who are not only able to provide the best value, but are also at the forefront of technology and are willing to work closely with Quilt members to develop and expand technology beyond that of a standard provider-customer relationship.”
The Quilt’s 2018 Commodity RFP Schedule and key milestones can be found here.
The components of the 2018 RFP will be available soon, which will include a Letter from the President and CEO along with the CIS RFP Overview Document, and CIS RFP Essay. If you have any questions regarding the documents or RFP process, please contact Sharon Akkoul at sakkoul@nysernet.org.
For any additional questions, please contact Jen Leasure at jen@thequilt.net.
Read More...The Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network Newsletter for October 2017 is now available. The newsletter features articles on the following topics:
- CAAREN Participates in Global City Teams Challenge;
- Course Development Underway for Capital Region Advanced Cyber Range;
- CAAREN Collaborates on PA2040 Project;
- CAAREN Participates in K20 Initiative with U.S. UCAN Program;
- and Coming Soon: Cloud Exchange Services
Visit the CAAREN News and Updates site to read more…
Read More...The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER), in collaboration with The Quilt, a national consortium of research and education networks across the US, hosted the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Principal Investigators (PI) and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) PI Workshop in Albuquerque, NM last week. The event convened 149 participants representing 111 different institutions across the US.
This was the third annual workshop of the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Program PIs. It was the second workshop to include the Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) PIs. Building upon the success of the previous workshops, this year’s combined event emphasized the critical role of cybersecurity innovation as essential to campus, regional, and national cyberinfrastructure. At the workshop, NSF award recipients met in-person, exchanged project findings, interacted with national cyberinfrastructure experts and collaborated across project areas and project regions.
“The success of the Albuquerque 2017 PI Workshop, which builds on the past two workshops, is based on the meaningful dialogue among a diverse set of colleagues discussing the latest research, best practices and possibilities for advanced cyberinfrastructure in support of science research and education applications,” said Wendy Huntoon, KINBER’s president and CEO.
“The Albuquerque workshop assembled a unique set of individuals, program topics, and discussion that formed the basis for addressing challenges as well as possibilities for advanced cyberinfrastructure. New to the this year’s workshop was a smaller very successful session focused on the emerging role of the Cyberinfrastructure Engineer in supporting campus cyberinfrastructure and applications,” said Jen Leasure, president and CEO of The Quilt.
The workshop promoted dialogue across a range of important and timely topics in campus networking including the larger context of campus cyberinfrastructure and cyberinfrastructure security.
The 2017 PI Workshop was again co-located with two other community meetings, the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC) meeting and The Quilt Fall Member Meeting. The three events convened 270 participants representing 171 institutions. Joint programming with the other two co-located event participants on Oct. 3-5 provided an opportunity to develop stronger ties between campus cyberinfrastructure, network security, science driven applications and regional networks as technical and cyberinfrastructure resources.
Presentations from the workshop, which was supported by NSF grant 1745644, are available online here to provide an ongoing resource for the national community on campus cyberinfrastructure and cybersecurity research and practices.