University

The 20 public and private universities located in the 4 Convergence Regions, for over 100 faculties and about 500.000 enrolled students, will benefit of the GARR-X Progress infrastructure.

In addition, music conservatories, fine arts, dance and drama academies (i.e. “Istituti di Alta Formazione Artistica, Musicale e Coreutica” - or AFAM in brief), which have a legal status equivalent to Universities in the Italian education system, are also included in the project.

The project aims at meeting the academic community’s emerging requirements:

• Widespread and dependable network infrastructure, both for the interconnection of secondary university locations and facilities (e.g. laboratories) and to support research collaborations, with a special focus on public-private partnerships;
• Integration of geographically distributed sites, in order to facilitate data collection, processing and sharing with high levels of data integrity and confidentiality, thanks to the implementation of optical or virtual private networks overlaying the wide area network;
• Support to advanced teaching techniques, through e-learning platforms, multimedia archives, digital libraries and exhibitions, live events. The raising usage of multimedia and interactive contents and applications causes the demand for bandwidth to grow dramatically, especially in large organizations such as Universities. For this reason, there is nowadays a demand for guaranteed-bandwidth 10 Gbps links and higher. Furthermore, the uptake of multimedia activities such as streaming transmission and multi-site live events production by universities and performing art academies can generate important traffic peaks for short periods, which must be taken in due account when dimensioning the infrastructure;
• Support to technology transfer initiatives addressing the private sector, especially at the local level (i.e. the local university carrying out a technology transfer action to SMEs operating on the territory), also thanks to the integration and interoperability among different domains at the national and international level;


• Support to disaster recovery and business continuity services dedicated to universities, through the availability of large storage resources and service backup.