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Dr Constantinos Vrontos
The platform’s multi-tenancy requirements, with the need to offer requests for new resources and allow users to manage the resources they’ve already been provided — including everything from virtual machines, to networks, servers, and more — represent a supremely complex undertaking.
JOINER needed a nerve centre. So we built The Brain.
The JOINER Brain is the single point of managing and controlling the entire JOINER platform. It’s a vital component in our ability to offer cutting-edge researchers a flexible and accessible real-world test environment.
This is a solution that we’ve developed entirely in-house. To pull it off, we assembled a team of network experts, cloud experts, software developers, and designers who’ve been building and tweaking the Brain since the JOINER portal formally launched in June of this year.
A complex challenge, simplified
Much like a human brain, the beauty of JOINER’s Brain lies in the way it makes something incredibly complex appear simple.
Platform users don’t need advanced working knowledge of Juniper Networks, Fortinet, AWS, VMware Cloud, or the racks of hardware and other software components that make up the JOINER platform in order to get the most from it. No more intricate experience of different equipment or understanding the nuances of different vendors. Harmonising these elements is now our job. The Brain allows users to jump right in and remain focused on their research.
Our resources need to be able to be shared flexibly with different companies and researchers. We’ve embraced these complexities in pursuit of a unique platform that can cover the widest range of research possible, while maintaining all necessary security protocols.
More time for focused research
This secure, simplified access helps us meet our ambition to offer a real-world test environment, accelerate prototyping, and close the gap between lab trials and successful deployments. We’re eliminating the hassle of configuring every new test environment from scratch, so that researchers can move more quickly from closed environments to commercial settings.
Time is of the essence for short-term, 18-month research projects. Yet half of that project time can easily be eaten up by network design and component procurement. Setup lead times can quickly stretch beyond six months, with research only kicking off a year or more into the project’s lifespan. The JOINER Brain truncates this process, cutting out months of delays.
Accelerating innovation
We continue to iterate. What we, as a team, are now working towards is a fully automated way of instantiating, bringing up experiments and supporting new research and new products. Anything that the Brain can’t handle alone is currently supported by a dedicated operations team who ensure the platform maintains its smooth running.
And in this sense, it’s not just the research being performed via the platform that is breaking new ground: the platform itself, its design, setup, and configuration, is an example of telecoms innovation itself. In the future that JOINER enables, innovation begets innovation.
The JOINER Brain is now live. To find out more about how you can access the JOINER portal, get in touch with the team.