News: May 1, 2000 - UM Campus Backbone Upgrade

Over the weekend the University of Michigan's link to the Michigan GigaPoP and Internet2/Abilene as well as to MichNet was upgraded from 100M bps half duplex to 622M bps full duplex. This new high speed link carries both Internet2 traffic and commodity Internet (aka Internet1) traffic. The link carries traffic for the ITD campus backbone, the CAEN backbone and the MCIT backbone.

This upgrade gives the University of Michigan much better access to its full 622M bps attachment to the Michigan GigaPoP and on to Internet2/Abilene.

This upgrade gives the University better access to the commodity Internet as well, but improvements in access to the commodity Internet will be much less dramatic due to bottlenecks within MichNet or elsewhere on the Internet. The Merit Network has an additional 155M bps of commodity bandwidth on order between Ann Arbor and Chicago to help this situation for the UM and other organizations in Michigan.

With this upgrade the main source of limitations in the Internet2 bandwidth that is available to most UM campus users is now likely to be the speed of attachments between the campus backbones and departmental LANs, the speed of attachments between individual computers and departmental LANs or the speed of the individual computers themselves.

The UM Ann Arbor campus backbone consists of three backbone networks operated by ITD, CAEN and MCIT.

The ITD backbone is a 622M bps full mesh ATM core, with links to edge routers operating at 155M bps and links from edge routers to departments operating at either 10M bps or 100M bps.

The CAEN backbone is a 622M bps ATM core, but access is currently limited to 155M bps and departmental connections are 10M and 100M bps. Work is underway to remove the 155M bps limitation within the CAEN network.

The MCIT network backbone is a gigabit ethernet (1000M bps full duplex). The entire MCIT backbone is behind a firewall (actually two firewalls with one acting as a backup in case of certain types of equipment or network failures) that operates at 100M bps full duplex. There are plans to upgrade the firewall attachment. After the upgrade it is estimated that the firewall will support between 350M and 450M bps following the upgrade.

Peak traffic from the Medical Center through the firewall is currently only 30M bps, so even before the upgrade the firewall does not seem to impose any constraints on network access from the Medical Center. The MCIT firewall exists to provide important security for the UM medical campus including access auditing, potential authentication point for internet access to clinical data, traffic analysis, an interface to perimeter intrusion detection, and a single point from which to provide filtering services, removing filters from internal routers and server based filters. If the firewall proves to be a constraint for some applications, the MCIT staff will be happy to work with researchers to find solutions that meet the researchers' needs and preserve the security of the Medical Campus's network.

The campus upgrade was designed and implemented by the staff of ITCOM, a unit of the Information Technology Division, and with the assistance of staff at Merit Network, a non-profit organization that provides Internet services to Michigan's educational, govermental and non-profit institutions.

View informaiton on the ITD campus backbone upgrade that was completed in late February 2000.

Back to the Internet2 at UM page.