OIT upgrades campus backbone to 10Gb/s

OIT ComTech has upgraded the campus network gateway, core and distribution routers – collectively referred to as backbone routers – to 10 Gb/s Ethernet technology. For more than a decade, NC State has utilized 1G/bs technology.

The backbone upgrade will alleviate the congestion of main distribution routers in certain regions of campus wherein area buildings collectively had a maximum of 2Gb/s of connectivity to the rest of campus and the Internet. After the upgrade, the main distribution routers will have 40Gb/s of northbound connectivity to the campus core by load balancing traffic across four 10Gb/s links.

These upgrades also will permit ComTech to continue to converge services such as voice and video onto a single unified Internet Protocol (IP) backbone and to deploy new technologies such as multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and IPv6. The core router upgrades also support a second project that is currently underway to provide 80Gb/s of connectivity between the OIT data centers and the rest of campus through the deployment of new data center core and aggregation routers. The additional backbone bandwidth will eventually permit individual buildings that receive network technology refreshes to have the option of connecting to the backbone at 10Gb/s rather than 1Gb/s if funding is available and if metrics determine that this type of connectivity is required.