Information Technology Strategic Planning

Projects

Project Title:

Network Edge Re-Architecture

Project Advocate:

Richard Kogut

Project Manager:

Janet Hines

Project Overview:

Re-architect the implementation of the campus network “edges”, leveraging the expanded capacity and functionality of new switches to provide better availability, security, and performance. Hardware, configuration changes, and the enablement of new functionality will be performed in a phased approach over a period of several months. No changes will be tangible on the user level; IP addressing and other functionality will be transparent across the upgrades.

Key Stakeholders:

ITOC and the campus in general

Benefits:

- Older equipment which is falling out of vendor support, and in some cases failing, will be replaced with current and supported hardware

- In the case of a fiber cut or similar outage between the CENIC POP and the campus or Castle, traffic will be automatically be re-routed over the remaining path

- CENIC HPR connectivity will be activated, increasing performance for traffic between UC campuses (and other HPR locations)

- The new edge switches will be integrated with the Sentriant intrusion detection and handling appliances, reducing our susceptibility to DOS and other attacks. They also contain more robust security and management features (such as finer-grained rate limiting).

Project Deliverables:

Other than internal documentation, there are no tangible project deliverables.

Initiative(s) Supported:

Related Projects:

Milestones:

Five phases will run from June 2009 through November 2009. The work prior to the Phase I milestone is the most time-consuming, as it involves extensive lab testing, planning, consultation with Extreme, and significant manual configuration. While the project should in theory only take a couple of months, we are indicating 11/30/2009 as the completion date, both because it would leave the Thanksgiving break available for work if needed, and to have completion before the beginning of the next admissions cycle.

Phase I – early August 2009 – replacement of edge switches with new Extreme Networks Black Diamond 12804’s, maintaining current configurations and functionality

Phase II (order subject to change) – later August – enable Telecom edge switch to Sentriant Clearflow functionality and install 2nd (existing) Sentriant at Castle in the same way.

Phase III – Replace aging equipment at Castle, including a Cisco 6509, an Extreme Network Summit 5i, and several other Cisco switches, while re-architecting the routing and switching functionality in general and to support further phases.

Phase IV – Deploy CENIC HPR connectivity (in addition to current DC connectivity), and deploy dynamic BGP routing at Castle and Telecom.

Phase V – Link Castle and Campus cores, standardizing the way buildings are connected in a manner compatible with the redundancy provided by the new architecture.

 

Costs & Funding (Capital & Operational):

The new edge switch purchases leveraged a trade-in promotion from Extreme, and was financed by an allocation from the campus discretionary fund (~$60K). An Extreme Summit x450a was purchased for Castle from IT funds (~$13K). Three stacks of Summit 400-48t switches for Castle are being taken from existing inventory.

Ongoing maintenance costs for equivalent functionality will decrease with the retirement of the Cisco equipment, although maintenance costs for the new edge switches are expected to increase as we move back to 4 hour response time (an option that was dropped by Extreme for the current switches due to their being near EOL).

Annual costs recharged by CENIC will also decrease due to the extent that inter-UC campus traffic is routed within CalRen instead of traversing the commercial Internet.

Project Team:

Dean Lawson – technical lead

Sharol Stang – assist in design and configuration

Other IT staff – as needed to verify that applications and services continue to function normally as upgrades and reconfigurations are performed.

Issues/Risks:

Proper design and configuration for changes of this magnitude is a very complex undertaking. To mitigate risk, an extensive laboratory mock-up will be used to verify configurations and settings, and significant guidance and verification is being provided by Extreme Networks engineers. Furthermore, a strategy of breaking the deployment down into 5 smaller phases has been adopted to reduce the risk of error and to simplify problem determination should things go wrong.


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