16,000 CWRU Computers Getting Gigabit Ethernet

lowlypeon writes "In a move that makes going back to college more tempting than usual, Case Western is installing fiber connections in 16,000 computers over the next year to give students a 1 gigabit per second Ethernet connection. Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used."

Comments

Monitoring multiple Gigabit Links

[slashnik]

"Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used"

I am interested to find out how the administrators will find out how the links are being used. What hardware/software has the power to track this level of traffic on a switched network.

Will they be using integrated RMON2 NAM cards in the switches or possibly analysis of Netflow data from the routers.

However they do it there will be a geat deal of data to crunch

slashnik

Re:Got to ask

[Geek In Training]

A 3c996 SX card runs about $475 at discount

Seriously, who is selling these people 16,000 fiber NICs that they will need to hook up all the PCs? Or are the students expect to foot the bill, on TOP of the $400 per year tech fee listed in the article?

Wouldn't this make a lot more sense?

Newegg.com sells retail boxed, Intel Gigabit cards for $55. So the question is now, how much is the fiber to giga-copper transceiver? :)

*Can* they use it?

[fm6]

Everyone seems to forget that network bandwidth is just part of the equation. How many people at Case Western have systems capable of processing that much data?

Where I work, we just got around to upgrading the network from 10BaseT to 100BaseT. Things did get faster -- but not ten times as fast. In a few extreme cases, apps that transfer umpteen megabytes in a short span were maybe 2 or 3 times as fast. Fifty percent was more typical.

Case networking, the early days

[Animats]

Case was into networking very early, but not too successfully. In the late 1960s, Case was briefly on the ARPANET, but became the only site to be kicked off by ARPA because their R&D project didn't produce much. An early laser link (helium-neon, in air) carried 2400 baud synchronous data for a card reader/printer across Cedar Avenue.

Case was once famous for doing the wrong thing really well. Just as interactive computing started to work, Case developed one of the best batch operating systems of the era. This was so cost-effective that it kept Case studends on punched cards much later than other comparable schools. The entire school ran on a 1 MIPS machine, with enough free time to support a private company selling excess time to commercial users.

Re:Minor correction

[[Dilbert]]

FUD! FUD! FUD!

As a student worker who has helped trace some of the fiber on campus and done work on several of the network maps, I believe I'm qualified to answer this to some extent. :)

The Mail server - yes, it is still unencrypted, although that should end with IMAP this fall. (in theory). Besides - the gigabit is all switched. Much harder to see what's going down the wire unless you MAC spoof.

As for the card access - i'm not sure about the past, but currently the card readers are on their OWN SET OF FIBER. The SSNs are sent as SERIAL data. The card readers are serial devices that come back to FOMs (fiber-optic modems) which run singlemode back to Crawford at the end of the quad. From crawford, all of the signals are muxed again onto one pair of singlemode that is then shot over to security across Adelbert, which houses the server that actually holds the access records for the buildings.

As far as I know, card access has always been done like this. there has been talk of running it over IP, encapsulated & encrypted to hell. However, that is just talk, and it hasn't been done, yet or ever. Your SSN isn't readable. Anyone who says otherwise has either tapped the actual fiber that runs the cardreaders, or the layout has changed from the past.