Capping a year’s worth of planning, the university is set to restructure the IT nerve system that caries information throughout the campus. The first phase of the network upgrade went into effect this past Sunday, when the new “backbone” was installed. The next phase of the project will replace all the network hardware on campus and radically reconfigure the way the university handles data.
According to a memo sent out Sunday by Network Manager Stephen Coleman, the upgrade went off without a hitch. “At approximately 09:30, each building was disconnected in turn from the old network backbone and successfully connected to the new backbone. Average downtime for each building was approximately 30 seconds.” A glitch-free, 30-second downtime, transfer of a system as big as UMass Boston is quite an accomplishment. After the backbone was shifted in the morning, the computer Data Center got its turn and all the servers, computers that supply the campus’ internet connections, were also successfully switched over.
A backbone for a large network is exactly what it sounds like. All the small networks and computing services tie into it like nerves into a human spine, and information is distributed through it. The bigger the backbone is, the faster internet and network connections get. For a large organization like UMass Boston, which has thousands of computers, hundreds of switches, and many databases and computing projects all dependent on network service to connect them to each other and to the outside world, a solid, fast backbone is very important.
The new backbone is a set of computers or “hardware” that operates in conjunction to direct traffic throughout the university system. This hardware runs at ten gigabits per second and replaces a backbone that had been in use since 1995, which ran at one gigabyte per second; it could move the average user’s entire computer storage capacity in a matter of seconds. The old network was state of the art in 1995 and Coleman called it “a big improvement over the old backbone speed of 1 Gbps,” but noted “It will not provide any immediate performance improvements to the campus due to the many older switches and hubs still in use on the network.”
Fear not: performance increases, like faster database searching and faster internet service, will come with the next phase of the project. All the old hubs and switches, devices that connect many personal computers into little groups and then connect the little groups to the university backbone, will be replaced with state-of-the-art hardware that do the same thing, only much faster. Coleman says, “Older, much less efficient hubs which have been in use since 1995 will be replaced by new 10/100 Mbps switches.”
This part of the project is scheduled to begin in November and users will begin to notice gains in performance. The last phase of the IT plan will be to restructure the university’s network from a “flat” LAN network to a routed network. A LAN, or “Local Area Network” means that all the computers can talk to each other, and when you have a lot of them, information can get bogged down. It’s like trying to get a message across a crowded dance floor: there’s a lot of pushing involved and everyone has to shout. A routed network organizes all the little bunches of computers on campus into to their own areas so that data can get there much more efficiently. That’s more like being in the VIP room: if you need a message sent out, they have staff for that.
The changes are part of UMB’s massive IT Plan, which has been several years in the planning and appears to being going smoothly so far, despite budgets cuts and the appearance of new Chief Information Officer Martyne Hallgren. The IT Plan is a $1.9 million proposal that already took a $600,000 hit in the budget crunch, but the infrastructure upgrades were not affected.
Coleman’s memo is optimistic about the upgrades, “Once [the upgrade] is completed, UMass Boston will have a modern, properly architected, true high-speed data network able to accommodate the university’s data networking needs for years to come.”