Governance
The Kentucky Council of Postsecondary Education (CPE) is a government agency of the Commonwealth responsible for the oversight of education and research information technology networks to ensure public postsecondary institutions have access to local, regional, national, and international academic resources. CPE acts as the sponsor for Kentucky’s Public Postsecondary Institution’s participation in Internet2’s Community Anchor Program (CAP), the nation’s largest research and education exchange infrastructure.
In collaboration with CPE, the University of Kentucky is responsible for the day-to-day operations of KyRON. These responsibilities include providing network engineering, network monitoring, and technical support service to KyRON members.
History
The KyRON network preceded the Kentucky Postsecondary Education Network (KPEN), which was established by CPE in 1998. As with the current KyRON network each public institution was previously connected to KPEN. The KPEN network was funded by CPE and was operated by a national commercial network provider. With KPEN, the commercial provider had end-to-end responsibility for all layers of network support. With an increasing institutional demand for network capacity combined with a decreasing CPE budget, the current KyRON network was formed.
Based on dark fiber IRUs (Indefeasible Right of Use) acquired by CPE in December 2013, 100Gb network hardware acquired by UK in conjunction with NSF Grant OCI-1246332, U. of Kentucky, CC-NIE Integration: Advancing Science through Next Generation SDN Networks”, KyRON provided 10 and 100Gb links between institutions, shared data centers, and Internet2. Institutions originally on KPEN (1Gb) were given the option to migrate (over CPE funded links) to KyRON (10Gb) and by December 2015 all but the geographically distributed community college system had migrated to KyRON.
Members
Eastern Kentucky University
Kentucky Community & Technical College System
University of Kentucky
UK Research Computing
University of Louisville
Morehead State University
Murray State University
Northern Kentucky University
Western Kentucky University