ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
174
The vision of the NextGen Network doesn ’ t end there , however . “ If your network isn ’ t designed to handle that influx of traffic , you ’ ll come to a crashing halt , so we are going to design a software-defined network ( SDN ),” says Evans . “ We ’ re holding a proof of concept ‘ bake off ’ between vendors to see who has the best SDN solution in the market , and we intend to elect a provider and put the first instance into production by January 2020 ,” she explains . In the long-term , Evans says that the aim is to achieve something that no other known higher education establishment in the world has yet managed : a fully-fledged , serverless architecture . “ Our goal is to have a predominantly infrastructure free footprint in the long-term , and that is truly radical : we will leverage our code and developer power to provision hardware both in the cloud and within strategic local physical locations . These goals are reliant on a well-designed and robust network that will handle the influx of large data traversing over the network . We plan to hire engineers to help us develop and build these NextGen
SEPTEMBER 2019