Five Questions With: George Loftus

OSHEAN PRESIDENT George Loftus knows that summer is often the busiest time for the members of the nonprofit broadband consortium. /
OSHEAN PRESIDENT George Loftus knows that summer is often the busiest time for the members of the nonprofit broadband consortium. /

As president and CEO of OSHEAN Inc., the nonprofit coalition of universities, hospitals, government agencies and other nonprofits, George Loftus has a front-row seat to the continued growth of Information Age infrastructure.
Known initially as the Ocean State Higher Education, Economic Development and Administrative Network, OSHEAN is constantly looking to improve its services in ways that member institutions ask, oftentimes by leveraging federal grant money.
As summer ‘vacation’ nears its end, Loftus provides an update on what OSHEAN members have been up to and what we can expect in the coming months from the $3-plus million consortium.

PBN: It may be summer vacation for many of OSHEAN’s members, but that is often a time to make updates to infrastructure. What has been a common upgrade among the educational institutions that OSHEAN serves?

LOFTUS: I actually posed your question to several OSHEAN members. Below are two sample responses; one from a small private university, and one from the largest public university.

According to Dave Porter, Director, Media & Technology Services at the University of Rhode Island, summer is definitely a busy time for network upgrades. This summer is particularly busy from a network standpoint as URI is adding 600, 802.11n access points to its wireless network and installing 100 new GB edge switches. URI also tests every port in the dorms (@2,500), and repairs as needed. It’s also prime time to install/repair classroom technology. URI is installing technology in 67 classrooms: ceiling mounted projectors, Crestron digital media controllers, Blu Ray DVD players, etc., and is cutting over hundreds of Centrex phones to VoIP.

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The punch list for Glenn Clark, Director, Network Services at Salve Regina University, is also lengthy and includes:

  • Bringing new facilities on line with networking capabilities.
  • Renovations to existing facilities and enhancement of their infrastructure.
  • Upgrades to Internet capacity to meet growing demands of the Salve community.
  • Enhancements and upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.
  • Upgrades to the campus switching backbone
  • Data center upgrades and enhancement (i.e. – infrastructure cleanup, switch upgrades, HVAC upgrade, UPS and power enhancements).
  • Port and cabling repairs in residence halls
  • Site-to-site and building-to-building fiber optic and cabling maintenance and upgrades.
  • Server and storage upgrades.
  • Application & Web enhancements, upgrades, and cutovers.
  • Telephony upgrades.
  • Security upgrades and enhancements.

On campus, Salve also hosts a number of conferences for other institutions over the summer and services them as part of the Salve community during their stays.

PBN: Nearly four years ago you created an off-site data center in Springfield, Mass., to help avoid the kinds of problems that New Orleans faced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Did this spring’s floods put the system to the test in any way? Have any of your members had to use the backup data since the center opened and why?

LOFTUS: Yes, in response to the growing member need for offsite disaster recovery solutions following Katrina, four years ago, OSHEAN took advantage of the regional fiber network owned by our sister organization, NEREN (North East Research & Education Network), to provide connectivity to a co-location facility in Springfield dubbed “Safe Harbor.” There our members can either rent rack space and locate their own equipment, or subscribe to our Cumulus Cloud Computing Service, which provides access to a virtualized environment. Presently, 13 members subscribe to Cumulus and use it in capacities varying from disaster recovery to test & development to production service.

Most members utilize the Safe Harbor on a daily basis, either for archiving data, running backups, or site testing and development. Fortunately, OSHEAN and its members were not directly affected by the floods this spring, so they did not have to call on Safe Harbor. In fact, we are happy to report that over the past four years, none of our members has declared an emergency requiring full-scale failover at the site. Several members, however, including those in Higher Ed and Health Care, do perform regular tests of their disaster plan. Honestly, I hope nobody has to ever use the site, but if they do, I am quite certain our members will be there to help.

PBN: This spring OSHEAN applied for federal stimulus money to build a fiber-optic cable to Block Island under the assumption that it could piggy-back on the connection that Deepwater Wind was planning to make to the mainland from its wind energy demonstration project off the island’s coast. How is that progressing? And what happens if the wind energy project is not built?

LOFTUS: I am sorry to report that we had to remove the proposal to bring fiber to Block Island from our application. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration requested that OSHEAN pull the Block Island piece because of growing concern that we would not be able to obtain the proper Environment Impact Assessment in time for the grant award. Despite this setback, we are still very eager to help provide Block Island with greater broadband access. So, should the wind energy project go forward, I believe that we would work with the developer to explore opportunities to bring fiber to Block Island.

While the Block Island cable garnered a lot of attention, it was only a small piece of the proposal. If funded, our Beacon 2.0 Project will bring $22 million in federal funds and a projected 210 jobs. We will install an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in all five counties in Rhode Island and in nearby Bristol County, Mass. The network will provide Rhode Island’s Community Anchor Institutions, such as schools, libraries, colleges, hospitals, government and public safety agencies, with the an infrastructure that will support their broadband needs for decades.

PBN: Have any institutions joined OSHEAN this year? Do you feel as if you have reached the limit for members? If not, where do you see growth coming from?

LOFTUS: As a trend, OSHEAN welcomes approximately two new members each year; most recently adding the U.S. Naval War College and Blackstone Valley Community Health Center. When growing our consortium, we look for those nonprofit organizations that would best benefit from being on our network. For example, BVCHC will gain from being on the network with all of our hospital members. The Naval War College can take advantage of access to a dedicated education research network like Internet2.

I don’t think that we have reached our limit. OSHEAN’s charge is to provide our members with advanced IT solutions that offer the greatest benefit at the lowest cost and are best delivered collaboratively. Therefore, our strategy is to grow core services, not necessarily membership. This is the reason behind the recent development of our Cumulus Cloud Computing service, which provides members with Infrastructure as a Service capabilities in shared cost model. On the horizon, OSHEAN members will be exploring opportunities to develop mobile apps together, and have begun discussing ways to create a Federated Identification model that would allow members to have trusted access to shared resources.

PBN: Has OSHEAN explored getting involved in statewide WiMax efforts as a way to increase broadband penetration without having to support a more robust physical network? Why or why not?

LOFTUS: No, we have not explored this model, simply because our members have not asked us to do so. I am not even sure that Wi-Max today would satisfy our member’s growing appetite for broadband. The Anchor Institutions that comprise OSHEAN’s membership have a dichotomy; they have the greatest need for bandwidth, with the least ability to pay for it. This is the driving force behind our efforts to create collaborations that invest in advanced networking technologies, such as dark fiber, to deliver services tailored to the needs of education, health care and government.

If we are fortunate enough to be awarded the federal stimulus money, we will be installing fiber in the western region of the state (along Route 102 from Exeter to Woonsocket). It is our hope that we could entice a commercial Wi-Max provider to establish service in areas like Foster by linking Wi-Max towers to our fiber backbone.

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