Pipes play a key part in any aquarium. They are used for filtering, water supply, and salinity. Along similar lines, the world’s largest aquarium needed data pipes for crucial conferencing, collaboration, video, and other converged services.
The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Ga., ( www.georgiaaquar ium.org) opened with great fanfare in 2005. The not-for-profit tourist attraction utilizes over eight million gallons of water and features a large collection of aquatic animals. Its mission balances the triple imperatives of entertainment, education, and scientific research. This includes a veterinary teaching hospital connected via live conferencing to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).
Before its opening, the aquarium’s IT department recognized the importance of dedicated, burstable high bandwidth for its converged needs.
“We do a lot of high-definition photos and video content on our Web site,” says Beach Clark, Vice President of Information Technology for the aquarium. (The overused jokes tire him, but yes, he works in an aquarium, his first name is Beach, and yes, he is a Pisces). “This includes three live-video Web cams,” he says, adding that he and his five-person team as well as volunteers also post fish videos to You Tube.
Clark had previously worked for Home Depot for 12 years and was familiar with New York-based dark fiber and collocation company telx ( www.telx.com).
Besides Atlanta, telx has facilities in Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Dallas, Tex.; Miami, Fla.; New York, N.Y.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Santa Clara, Calif.; and Weehawken, N.J.
“Over 12 years, I had gotten to know the people at Georgia Tech,” says Beach. “And I knew they had gotten fiber left over from the Olympic Games. We got to talking about ways to connect them to the aquarium. I knew they had used telx as well.”
Location also played a role in the decision. Telx’s carrier hotel at 56 Marietta Street is located only a half mile from the aquarium, also a short two hops away from the Internet.
“We wanted the ability to have a hosted Web site with a hub-based bandwidth connection,” says Beach.
Beach says this includes 2 Gbps of dedicated fiber so the institution can prepare for future needs. The Aquarium colocates its core interconnection equipment with telx, which manages the cross connects.
Currently there are periods where the Web site is heavily accessed. The aquarium uses 10 to 20 Mbps, burstable to 100
Mbps. The burstable needs arise from a curious public eager to watch streaming video.
“For instance, when our whale sharks were delivered from Taiwan, we used the maximum high-speed bandwidth,” says Beach.
Collaboration plays an integral part as well. The network build enables interconnections to Southern Light Rail, a research network aggregator providing access to the Internet 2 network, as well as the National Lambda Rail and the Southern Crossroads, a research network peering service.
“By building our own dark fiber network into telx, we save money on various local loops that would otherwise be necessary to gain access to these invaluable research networks,” says Beach.
To handle the volume of data, the aquarium uses industry-standard load balancers. They also utilize name-brand firewalls and networking OS; a cautious Beach does not want brand names released for fear of hackers.
AT&T provides redundant connectivity in case of failover. While Bell South provides the aquarium’s VoIP over a metro Ethernet connection, Beach says the aquarium engages in a lot of high-definition, low-latency videoconferencing via telx fiber. It uses experimental open-source videoconferencing.
“We actually have veterinary interns connected through conferencing to the aquarium from their university,” says Beach. “We experimented with working with vets in our labs to spare the students a 60-minute drive all the way from Athens, Ga.”
Beach says it took only a couple of days for telx to light the fiber.
“We went live in incremental steps. In stages telx started bringing online nonessential kinds of functionality,” says Beach.
Telx did not provide any testing to the aquarium. No training was necessary. The final install of fiber took place during the first part of 2006.
“As a nonprofit, there is no measurable return on investment,” says Beach. “But the streaming video library we are building better positions us in the entertainment business.”
Moving forward over the next five years, Beach envisions the aquarium delivering content similar to larger companies such as Disney or the Discovery Channel.
“We certainly offer low-latency, high-definition digital video,” says Beach. “This is something that puts us in a different category than other aquariums and smaller amusement parks in 2008.” V
Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@vonmag.com.
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