Proud of What We’ve Built Together
When we started the GlobalNOC 20 years ago, our goal was simple. We want to work with our colleagues to help in building a new type of network built by the R&E community for the R&E community. This new type of network would have the agility, transparency, and performance needed for collaborative science and quickly-evolving educational needs.
Over those years, both the GlobalNOC and our community have grown and evolved together. Starting from a handful of people supporting a our lifelong partner Internet2, we now have over 100 service desk techs, engineers, developers, and supporting staff, working with over 20 different network partners.
We’ve assisted Internet2 through many generations of increasingly advanced national network infrastructure. We helped NOAA create and expand its N-Wave network backbone. We’ve led many NSF-funded international networking projects. We’ve worked with regional networks across the country to better serve their communities. We’ve advanced network performance and technologies resulting in networks that are nearly 3,000 times faster than when we started.
Time for an Organizational Upgrade
The GlobalNOC Renewal Program will mean a step up for the organization to put us on a new path
Through capacity increases, new services, and hardware upgrades, a network can serve its users effectively for many years. But eventually, it’s time for a complete upgrade and new generation of network. The same is true for organizations, and we believe that now is that time for the GlobalNOC.
Our community is maturing and expectations are rising. We face new economic and competitive pressures, security requirements, and a changing technology landscape formed by highly automated, orchestrated, and distributed compute, storage, and networking.
What worked for a team of 12 won’t work for a team of 120, let alone the growth that we expect. Our clients and our team have already started to feel these growing pains.
By surveying and interviewing our clients we know that we need to improve our responsiveness and transparency in some areas and our expertise in others. By talking with members of the team, we know that sometimes it’s harder than we’d like to do new things or make improvements across teams.
So, we’re going to spend the next 2 years reviewing how we work from top to bottom, designing the next generation of the GlobalNOC, and rolling it out. In part 2, I’ll describe how we’ve decided to organize this.
Director, Engineering