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Press release

CITES > project status > campus network upgrade > press release 1.23.06

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)

CONTACT: Charley Kline
UIUCnet Network Architect, CITES
Phone: 217-333-3339
Email: kline@uiuc.edu

January 23, 2006

Urbana, IL – After extensive evaluation and testing, CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services) has chosen the Foundry NetIron 40G family of products to replace the current network core equipment for UIUCnet, the campus network at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Transition to the new core is scheduled to start at the beginning of the Spring 2006 semester. The new network core platform for the Urbana campus is the same that was recently used to set an Internet2 land-speed record of 167.4 petabit-meters per second, maintaining a 5.58 Gigabit per second (Gbps) transfer rate over 30,000 km of trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.

CITES selected the Foundry equipment after completing the research and evaluation of products in late September. During the process, the core design was also presented to the Network Upgrade Technical Advisory Board for feedback. CITES received approval from the University Board of Trustees in November and then ordered the equipment. “The new network core, based on NetIron 40G IPV4/IPV6 10-gigabit Service Provider Routers from Foundry Networks, will provide a ten-fold increase in network performance while improving capacity, manageability, and reliability of UIUCnet,” said Charley Kline, Campus Network Architect.

Each of the NetIron 40Gs will support 1 Gbps connections to up to 200 buildings and 10 Gbps connections to six buildings, fulfilling the need for bandwidth-intensive research needs. “The 40G platform also supports network technologies, such as the IP Version 6 protocol and MPLS, which will be deployed in the near future to further advance the technology of UIUCnet,” Kline said.