About EMMAN
EMMAN Limited is a company limited by guarantee and jointly owned by its members, eight Higher Education Institutions in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom.
EMMAN owns and runs a high bandwidth Regional Network whose primary purpose is to deliver connectivity to the SuperJANET network and the Internet for the Higher Education Institutions, Further Education Institutions, Specialist Colleges and other institutions across the East Midlands region. The network is managed by EMMAN Ltd under a contract with JANET(UK) who operate SuperJANET.
EMMAN also provides Internet connectivity separate from SuperJANET and wishes to develop communications within the region to encompass a broader range of customer including libraries, schools, local authorities, Small business enterprises and lifelong learning organisations.
History
The East Midlands Metropolitan Area Network (EMMAN) was set up in 1994, initially as a point to point link between The University of Nottingham (UoN) and Nottingham Trent University (NTU) as a mechanism to connect NTU to SuperJANET via the SMDS connection at UoN. The link consisted of a dark fibre connection, supplied by the local cable TV franchise, Diamond Cable. The connection consisted of an FDDI ring with two extra dark fibres for development work.
Early in 1996, University of Derby (UoD) was added to the MAN using an 8 Mbit/s Mercury connection to UoN. During 1996 and early 1997 six JANET secondary connections were made directly to the MAN at NTU. In 1997 the UoN to NTU link was upgraded to 155 Mbit/s ATM together with an ATM connection from NTU to UoN Adult Education Centre. The 1998 developments saw the extension of the MAN to the NTU Clifton site, an alternative route in the Nottingham area and a dark fibre link to Derby (installed in January 2000) with a consequent upgrade to ATM at 155 Mbit/s. In addition EMMAN was directly connected to a 34 Mbit/s ATM link from SuperJANET III at UoN.
In 1998 a bid for funding to add connections to Loughborough and De Montfort University, Leicester (DMU) was successful. This involved the provisioning of dark fibres from Nottingham to Loughborough, from Loughborough to Leicester, and the provision of ATM switches at Loughborough University and De Montfort University. These links were made live in March 1999.
A year later, another bid for the HEFCE MAN initiative for 1999/2000 was also (mostly) successful and plans were made for the University of Leicester, University College Northampton and the University of Lincolnshire & Humberside (Lincoln campus) to be connected.
The increasing number of sites and the general increase in network traffic meant that the SuperJANET link from EMMAN became saturated and towards the end of 1999, UKERNA put forward a plan to provide an additional 155 Mbit/s link from Nottingham to London, which would provide an upgrade for both EMMAN and the West Midlands MAN, MidMAN. The EMMAN part of this link was made live in March 2000.
On January 16th 2001, the link from EMMAN was switched from SuperJANET III to SuperJANET 4. MidMAN followed on the 13th March and the 155 Mbit/s links from Nottingham to London and from Nottingham to Warwick became redundant.
Once the SuperJANET 4 connection at Nottingham was operational, both the universities in the City of Nottingham moved from ATM to connecting their LANs to EMMAN with fast ethernet. In both cases, some FE colleges connected through the universities’ sites continued to use ATM.
In April 2001, University College Northampton was connected to EMMAN via DMU. In the same month, the University of Leicester was also connected with gigabit ethernet links to the University of Nottingham and the nearby De Montfort University, for resilience.
During the latter part of 2001, the number of FE colleges connected to EMMAN rose to over thirty as UKERNA implemented the national extension of JANET to FE sites. The East Midlands Regional Support Centre was set up to assist the colleges with the implementation and running of their connections to SuperJANET.
The University of Lincoln (previously the Lincoln site of the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside) was connected via Nottingham Trent University, bringing the total of HE institutions to eight. These eight institutions entered into negotiation for making the MAN a legal entity and a company called EMMAN Ltd was formed in March 2002.
Meanwhile, a further funding round enabled the upgrade of most of the links from ATM to Gigabit ethernet. Two additional 8 Mbit/s serial links were also procured which connected the University of Derby to Lincoln and UCN to the University of Leicester, giving Derby and UCN resilient routes to the rest of the MAN and hence to SuperJANET.
During 2006 the backbone was completely overhauled in readiness for the upgrade from SuperJANET 4 to SuperJANET 5. An optical network layer was introduced directly over the fibre links between node sites to provide massive scalability in bandwidth across the backbone. This network utilises Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) with 10Gb/s per wavelength. Two new core nodes were created at the Nottingham Trent University secondary datacentre and the University of Nottingham primary datacentre and the EMMAN topology re-engineered into a dual star format. Each core node has a separate connection into SuperJANET and each edge node has dual connections into the core to provide a fully resilient service.
A direct commercial link to the Internet was commissioned in 2007 to provide Internet access for EMMAN connected customers’ activities that are not eligible for use over JANET. Additional public sector organisations connected to Super Janet via EMMAN and 2008 saw all FE college uplinks into EMMAN upgraded to 100Mbps.