Communications Infrastructure Committee Meeting
Friday, December 03, 2010
B212 NESB 1:00-2:00 PM
Minutes
In attendance: Scott Baily, Ty Boyack, Jim Cox, Michael Dennis, CJ Keist, Robin McGee, Greg Redder, Jon Schroth, Jon Peterson
The only agenda item was to discuss the recommendations from the subcommittee formed to prioritize the list of buildings (those recommendations are included below).
Redder explained the rationale behind selecting all buildings “daisy chained” behind a primary building. Objectives included selecting multiple buildings that were susceptible to single points of failure and areas of relatively low complexity (all buildings on main campus, no firewalls to deal with, etc.)
The proposed design included an HP 5400 with two “20+4” cards (20 copper and 4 fiber). This would allow a clean point of demarcation between the building’s link and the building.
The estimated cost to upgrade connectivity to CAHS buildings, as proposed below, would be approximately $91K. Not all buildings in that scenario, e.g. the S. College Gym, would be placed on dual gigabit Ethernet connections as their data requirements don’t warrant that level of speed and protection.
Security concerns were raised – we need to ensure that the MDF switches selected will in no way limit edge switch features such as port security. ACNS will investigate this and report back to the group.
The issue of inequity across the colleges and administrative units was also raised, especially given the limited annual budget.
Schroth suggested investigating a (CSURF?) loan that would allow more buildings to be done up front, to be repaid in subsequent years. Possible issues here include the lack of manpower to upgrade approximately 1/3 of the campus buildings in a year, and the lack of funding to pay the loan off in a short amount of time.
A motion was made to change the priority buildings to include the “hub” locations around campus, and to install an HP 5400 switch with a single 20+4 card. This will help to maintain the costs and is more fair and equitable. Colleges or units desiring to upgrade additional buildings, or to purchase a second 20+4 card, will have the ability to do so at any time. The motion carried unanimously. Schroth will relay this recommendation to the CITAC members; should there be strong disagreement from those not represented at the CIC he will report that back for our reconsideration.
The meeting adjourned at 2:00 PM.
Dear CIC members,
For our meeting this Friday, please review the summary and recommendations (below) from the sub-committee who established initial priorities for this year’s building upgrades. Thanks to Greg, Michael and Jon for their efforts here.
In hopes of reducing possible confusion regarding some of the abbreviations in Greg’s analysis below:
OT – Occupational Therapy Building
SML – Surgical Metabolic Lab, an old name for a building on the foothills campus where a backbone router is currently located
ENSB – The name given to the redundant pair of routers located in Engineering and NESB. In the new design, these two routers will replace the 5 routers currently used in the campus backbone network.
Thanks,
Scott
------
From: Redder,Greg
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 4:49 PM
To: Baily,Scott
Cc: Dennis,Michael; Peterson,Jon; ''
Subject: CIC Subcommittee notes 11/30/10
Scott,
Michael, Jon and I met regarding prioritizing the first group of buildings. Here's a summary of what is being recommended along with what we feel the full committee needs to address as concerns going forward.
Here are the list of buildings to tackle first, in this order:
AHS College
- OT-and all buildings daisy-chained behind it
Liberal Arts College
- Clark-and all buildings behind it.
Ag Sci College
- Shepardson-and all buildings behind it.
There are a couple of principles upon which OT and all of AHS was picked to go first:
- Long term goal is to eliminate the “edge” core routers at SML, OT and Yates and condense all to “ENSB”. AHS connects to the OT router and we’d like to move those connections off to “ENSB”
- “ENSB” runs at 30% CPU. In the end, CIC is proposing moving all significant buildings to be dual connected to ENSB. Concerns of CPU load exist. It is believed that moving all connections to ENSB will *not* raise the CPU load on ENSB as most of that traffic is layer2 traffic which is handled in ASICS. Traffic currently affecting the CPU is not affecting the CPU due to physical layout, but rather the nature of the traffic independent of physical layout. Nonetheless, we’d like the chance to prove that before we get too far. One way to do that is to move an entire College to ENSB rather than just the building identified as the hub. Doing this allows us to measure our ability to scale the proposed design. It was put forth that simply moving one building, such as OT, doesn’t tell us what we need to know about CPU load and where we want to end up when this project is done. Hence, the whole College needs to be done.
- AHS has one of the most daisy-chained networks on campus and thus, one of the best test cases.
- AHS has a pretty “intense” network, but maybe a little less challenging high-compute environment than some of the other networks such as Engineering, VetMed.
Once AHS is tackled and the process assessed, Clark and Shepardson can be addressed in that order. They are roughly equal in complexity and design and were picked to go in the order they originally appeared on the spreadsheet. Overall, they are picked next for similar reasons as OT, but primarily because they are technically easier than the remaining ones.
That leaves, in no particular order:
Engineering College
- Engineering
- Atmos
Natural Sciences College
- NESB
CVMBS
- A/Z
- VTH
- ARBL
The sub-committee does not have a recommendation on proceeding beyond OT, Clark, Shepardson at this time. We feel that the whole committee needs to hear out and understand some challenges that exist with the remaining areas:
Engineering-extremely complex, high capacity network spread out across main campus and west campus. Meanwhile, they have 10G pending to part of Foothills. I think we need to get a few other networks under our belt before we tackle that one.
Natural Sciences-complicated by having a firewall in front of most of their LANs and because they run their own router. The current CIC plan does not lend itself to this design.
CVMBS-another complicated one with rigorous demands of the network, infrastructure and support. This is a complicated network spread across main campus, west campus and south campus. Probably the hardest network to understandand and get a handle on. We’d need some time to tackle this one and make sure our model holds well before attempting this one.
I’m prepared to draw some pictures at the meeting to help explain these concepts and expand on our concerns/rationale.
Thank you,
--Greg
Greg Redder
Academic Computing & Networking Services
Colorado State University, Campus Delivery 1018
Fort Collins, CO 80523
(970)491-7222,