Attendees:
Steve Francis,
Nathan Freitas,
Ben Humphrey,
Elise Meyer, and
Jason Simpson
Unable to Attend:
Kevin Barron,
Jim Frew,
Larry Murdock,
Steven Pope,
Kevin Schmidt, and
Vince Sefcik
General Business
Elise mentioned that Bill Woods from Cabletron offered to have some of their
technical people come and give us non-vendor-specific technical lectures on
topics like ATM if we were interested. It was decided that this could be used
as a free sanity check of our network design, or as a good way to learn more
about VLANs.
We thought it was a little premature for anything right now,
but we'd like to keep the option open.
Research Group Reports
We discussed whether we should have one solution for the projects that
required end-to-end ATM and another for the rest of the projects. End-to-end
ATM capability requires a more expensive box, but it would be an advantage
for maintenance cost issues to have everyone using the same equipment. No
decision was made on this issue. We discussed whether the ITP's QoS
requirements put them in the same group as NGNM, since the GSR won't be
able to support QoS until 6/98. It was expressed that between 1/98 and 6/98
there probably be enough bandwidth available that QoS won't be an issue.
Backbone Topology Options
One of the technology decisions to be made was to choose between ATM and
Gigabit ethernet.
Gigabit ethernet has an effective throughput currently of 622 Mb/s which
is the same as OC-12 ATM.
The NGNM project requires end-to-end ATM, so we can't use Gigabit ethernet as
our backbone technology.
We decided to work on a backbone design that uses OC-12 ATM to connect backbone
equipment. We discussed whether the backbone equipment should be
ATM switches or edge switches.
We are going to research using ATM switches.
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Option 1 |
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Option 2 |
Our current
design would have the ATM switches provide an OC-3 ATM feed to each research
group. In order to more efficiently use campus fiber, we don't think that we
can use a single backbone ATM switch that feeds all of the research groups.
We discussed two possible options for locating switch equipment throughout
campus, shown above. The goal of these designs is to efficiently use
campus fiber, and to allow for additional hookups to this backbone.
Since we are just starting to research the available equipment from each
vendor, we don't know who has the products that we need,
but we want to stay aware of when
CalREN-2 will be purchasing their equipment so that we can take advantage of their
discount schedule if we do decide to go with either Fore or Cisco.
We discussed a design of a possible network
topology. Note that we also discussed financial and management responsibility for the different equipment.
A couple of the other issues discussed were: switching between VLANs (requires
hitting a router), MPOA, Cisco's TAG switching and the differences of
emulated LANs which could cause intercampus routing congestion.
One of the important issues that we need to be aware of is that the router
that will be used to route between the various LANs is the Comm Svcs Cisco
router.
Action Items for Next Meeting: August 14, 1997
We assigned action items to the people present. If you weren't present, we
need you to help with these various topics, so please contact the person
indicated so that you can coordinate contacting vendors.
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Steve Francis will look into the campus fiber availability and which projects
also have access to single mode fiber. He will also look into the costs of the
required interfaces for the Comm Svcs Router.
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Ben Humphrey and Jason Simpson are researching ATM switches.
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Nathan Freitas is researching 100Base-T switches w/OC-3 uplinks, especially
the options available for the LanPlex.
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Elise Meyer is researching edge switches.
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