Attendees:
Kevin Barron,
Nathan Freitas,
Steve Francis,
Elise Meyer,
Larry Murdock,
Rich Prohaska, and
Jason Simpson
Unable to Attend:
Ben Humphrey,
Jim Frew,
Roger Lenard,
Stephen Pope,
Kevin Schmidt,
Vince Sefcik, and
Ed Mehlschau
Review of BEG Meeting
Lack of fiber to the Arts Building. The cost to bring ring 4 as
far as the Arts building is between $89K - 103K just to run the
fiber (i.e. no terminations). Since we only have a budget of
$120K, it was decided that it would be better if Arts could find
a location in a building that already had fiber for their server.
Nathan said that the Arts project had been submitted under the
auspices of the Alexandria Project, and he and Jason said that it
would be possible to locate the Arts server in Alexandria space
in the library. Nathan said that Victoria would continue to work
toward getting fiber run to Arts independently from the CalREN-2
project.
Single-mode fiber. Our report to the BEG recommended installing
SMF to support highspeed connections between two backbone switches.
We were asked if we could get away with just having a single switch
located centrally, and then use the existing MMF fiber to connect
out to the research groups. Steve Francis reported that the
ATM Forum specification for dB loss on OC-3 multi-mode fiber was
9 dB, and the dB loss from North Hall
to Kohn Hall (ITP) was 25dB. So our existing fiber plant doesn't
allow for either a single switch solution, or a solution with two
switches that are connected with high speed interfaces using ATM
OC-3 or ATM OC-12. Rich Prohaska was going to look into the dB
loss budgets for Full Duplex Fast Ethernet.
Note: Rich discovered
that Cisco & Bay interfaces allow -13dB loss.
We are currently considering two possible solutions to augmenting
the fiber on Ring 2: 1) Make use of the GTE SMF that runs between
Public Safety and Engr II. (This requires negotiation with GTE, plus
splices to the fiber.) or 2) Split Ring 2 with a point-to-point run
of fiber from North Hall to Broida/Noble. The first option would
require two backbone switches, and the second would require one.
CENIC TPG Progress
The CENIC Technical Planning Group will be deciding between ATM and Packet
over Sonet in the near future since they will be presenting the final plan
to the CENIC board for approval on November 10th. Steve Francis thinks that
the TPG is leaning toward ATM.
GSE Video-Based Instruction and Research
Bill Doering from the GSE spoke about the new project that the GSE was
undertaking that might require CalREN-2 network speeds. As part of their
renovation project they are creating a new research lab that will be used
as a video server for graduate student research. They are also participating
in a grant with ~20 different universities to do distance learning. Based
on their networking needs of 10Mb/s it was recommended that they upgrade their
connection to the current FDDI backbone first.
Prices
We want to start getting prices for equipment satisfying our possible
configurations.
Note: I am checking with Bob Bisho to see if we need to
make our price request official.
We are considering both ATM and Gigabit Ethernet as a backbone technology.
It was noted that there should at least be ATM connecting the North Hall
backbone switch to the CENIC ATM switch, and since Music would be connecting
to the North Hall switch, they might be able to have an ATM interface, even
if the rest of the new network wasn't ATM.
RFI responses
Steve Francis distributed IBM's response. Elise said that she would scan it to
put it on the web.
Action Items for Next Meeting
- Communication Services is negotiating with GTE regarding use
of the single-mode fiber that currently exists between Public
Safety and Engineering II.
- Elise will send out a configuration list that we should be asking
the vendors about. [Note: I've included the configuration list
that I sent out on 10/27 under the price section.]
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