Azerbaijan's national research network AzScienceNet presents the new infrastructure and services

Since the country visit to Azerbaijan by TERENA officials Valentino Cavalli and Kevin Meynell on 29th March 2010, AzScienceNet has achieved a lot in developing its infrastructure and services, following the valuable recommendations and advices by TERENA.

The Institute of Information Technology of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (IIT of ANAS) which established and operates the national research network AzScienceNet, has completed the construction of new premises for AzScienceNet and created a new Data Center which will be the main center of the new technologies and services like storage, cloud, grid, high performance computing, web hosting, eduroam and AzCert for the research and education community of Azerbaijan.

On April 13, 2012 AzScienceNet held an opening ceremony with the participation of high level government officials. President of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) Mahmud Karimov, Minister of Information and Communications Technologies Ali Abbasov, Deputy Minister of Education Gulu Novruzov, Chairman of the Supreme Attestation Commission under the President of Azerbaijan Arif Mehdiyev, Chairman of the Committee of State Land and Cartography Garib Mammadov, Executive Director of Science Development Foundation Elchin Babayev, Vice-President of ANAS Arif Hashimov and other officials from universities and academia honored the meeting with their valuable speeches and recommendations.

The development of AzScienceNet is carried out within the framework of the state programs "2009-2015 State Program on Implementing the National Strategy on Development of Science" and "2010-2012 State Program (E-Azerbaijan) on Development of ICT" Director of AzScienceNet, Prof. Rasim M. Alguliyev summarized the achievements in last two years as below: A new dedicated building of AzScienceNet has been constructed by IIT of ANAS with all the necessary facilities. The building has also a new conference hall with the capacity of 170 people.

• A new Data Center has been created
• New AzScienceNet users register has been created and a new web site has been launched
• The video conference system has been improved
• Eduroam service has been created
• "Network monitoring and information security services" have been created
• AZ-CERT has been established and accredited by Trusted Introducer on 31 May 2011
• Antispam and antivirus services are enhanced
• Distance education services are developed

AzScienceNet, following an important recommendation of TERENA has developed the relations with Educational institutions to a further point.Every PhD student in Azerbaijan, regardless of the research area has been trained, examined and certified by IIT of ANAS using AzScienceNet services. It should also be noted that in the last 10 years, more than 10200 PhD students benefited from the services of AzScienceNet.

On April 29, 2012, AzScienceNet together with the Ministry of Education held an online competition, “National Informatics Olympiad among University Students” where 24 different teams from the universities have participated in.

The event continued with speeches by the state officials, who appreciated the development of AzScienceNet and made recommendations for the future development. They expressed that the establishment of new services like cloud computing, grid technologies and e-library are very important for the research and education community in Azerbaijan and AzScienceNet has the capacity to serve the education community as well.

They also recommended AzScienceNet to establish a national scientific publication database center of the national scientific publications and serve as a national center for the international databases such as Springer, Elsevier, and Thompson Reuters.

At the end of the event, the new face of www.science.gov.az, official site of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences has been presented. www.science.gov.az was established in 1995 as the first web site of Azerbaijan and the first web site of AzScienceNet.