Campus network core upgraded
In another networking improvement aimed at complementing the ongoing Campus Network Upgrade Project, network engineers at Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services upgraded the network core equipment over the summer to make the campus network more reliable, redundant and future-proof.
According to Mike Smeltzer, director of networking at CITES, with the help of multi-Virtual Routing and Forwarding (“multi-VRF”) technology, a relatively new innovation in data networking that allows for different classes of traffic, CITES has engineered a solution that not only provides an additional layer of redundancy in the network core but also scales better to the type of high-performance research computing prevalent on campus.
“The primary benefit of an upgraded network core is the ability to extend the reach of the research network’s connections to the entire Urbana campus,” Smeltzer said.
Multi-VRF networking enables CITES to create dedicated, low-latency connections to high-bandwidth resources on research networks. For example, if researchers at Illinois wished to connect to the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, CITES can take the researchers’ computers and give them express-lane access to the European research facility, allowing them to bypass the university’s firewall based on the computers’ IP address but still be protected from malicious Internet traffic.
“Firewalls create latency and delay, which is frustrating if you’re a researcher,” said Charley Kline, network architect for the Urbana campus. “Multi-VRF technology allows us to create a secure, dedicated path between two points on the Internet – Urbana and CERN, for example – that bypasses the university’s firewall. This allows us to balance protecting the a researcher’s computer from the Internet while simultaneously allowing them to connect to specific Internet resources such as CERN or Internet2 with the fastest possible connection that we can engineer.”
According to Kline, the old network core hardware did not have the ability to create dedicated research connections and consequently was at greater risk of network downtime because it “wasn’t sophisticated enough to handle individual IP-based requests.”
Similar to a car’s license plate, an IP address is a computer’s unique numerical identifier that’s assigned to it when connected to a network.
So, even if your office is tucked away on the outskirts of campus, you’ll now be able to get dedicated access to research networks such as Internet2.
Another problem the network core upgrade solves is the ability to add dedicated 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) links to campus buildings, an ever-increasing necessity for bandwidth-hungry researchers. Besides lacking additional 10 Gbps ports in some of the hardware in the network nodes, the vendor who produced the old hardware no longer makes or sells additional 10 Gbps cards. Now, the upgraded network core affords CITES the ability to add additional 10 Gbps links to buildings as the need for those faster connections arises.
Kline noted that the new equipment installed through the core upgrade is capable of running IP version 6, so the network core upgrade also served as a future-proofing measure.
