Exciting times

edgedemon · 14 Apr 2008 at 21:58

The pay might not be up to City standards but I love working in the network team at a London Uni

Busy weekend next month, 4 x 1 gig links to JANET, upgraded from 4 x 100Mb, 2 new Cisco routers to handle the gig links, and next January the whole JANET network gets connected to Internet 2 at CERN as part of the worldwide educational upgrade.
Add to that, sometime over the next 18 months, complete switch to VMware and co location hosting and implementing a new SAN infrastructure (finally getting to play with fibre channel switches :eek:

) as well as a 5000 ext VOIP roll out.

I have so so much 'bedtime reading' to get through

Pinkeyes · 15 Apr 2008 at 13:19

That is some speed !

I work at a college in the North West and we are scheduled to be upgraded from 10 Mbps to 100, and I thought that was something.

Just currently deciding whether to let the college know, or just keep the extra 90 Mbps for the IT department alone

J.B · 15 Apr 2008 at 14:19

That'll explain the constant JANET and EastNET disruption. I dont work on the network team but I am in IT at University of Hertfordshire. Seems every other day there is a new maintance schedule

bigredshark · 15 Apr 2008 at 15:03

We're considering an upgrade of one of our LINX connections to 10Gbit from 1Gbit at present, help out with iplayer traffic and the like. Thing is only Juniper M320s will take the 10Gbit ethernet PICs at present so we'd need to buy one of those.... (some people will know what an m320 costs I'm sure...

)

R4z0r · 15 Apr 2008 at 17:34

bigredshark said:
We're considering an upgrade of one of our LINX connections to 10Gbit from 1Gbit at present, help out with iplayer traffic and the like. Thing is only Juniper M320s will take the 10Gbit ethernet PICs at present so we'd need to buy one of those.... (some people will know what an m320 costs I'm sure...)

Why can't you use 10Gbit interfaces on a GSR or CRS?

edgedemon · 15 Apr 2008 at 22:00

J.B said:
That'll explain the constant JANET and EastNET disruption. I dont work on the network team but I am in IT at University of Hertfordshire. Seems every other day there is a new maintance schedule

Yeah, thats because they are rolling out 40Gb backbone to the regional MAN's now from 10Gb at the mo.
Just so the students can grab P2P even faster. I was at networkshop last week and there was lots of presentations on what they planning for SJ6 and 100Gb - at least someone is giving Virgin a run for their money on UK fibre back bone.

Pinkeyes said:
That is some speed !

I work at a college in the North West and we are scheduled to be upgraded from 10 Mbps to 100, and I thought that was something.

Just currently deciding whether to let the college know, or just keep the extra 90 Mbps for the IT department alone

Thats what I love about this place - you learn something everyday. I thought all educational institutions had been upgraded to 100Mb last year. If you can get away with it - rate shape the little darlings up another 10Mb and save the extra bandwidth for linking up the lecture theatre screens and having some kick ass MP gaming :-)

pdw8 · 16 Apr 2008 at 01:28

bigredshark said:
We're considering an upgrade of one of our LINX connections to 10Gbit from 1Gbit at present, help out with iplayer traffic and the like. Thing is only Juniper M320s will take the 10Gbit ethernet PICs at present so we'd need to buy one of those.... (some people will know what an m320 costs I'm sure...)

Not as much as a T640

Can't you use a 6509/7600 with XENPAKS?

bigredshark · 16 Apr 2008 at 11:45

pdw8 said:
Not as much as a T640

Can't you use a 6509/7600 with XENPAKS?

I could but we have a love affair with JUNOS, we've used Juniper M series routers as our edge boxes for 8 years and not one of them has ever crashed or fallen over, they define reliable for us. The command line is excellent too, the rollback command being a highlight.

TrX · 16 Apr 2008 at 19:43

Fun projects ahead, vmware + SAN is pretty nice. Rolling out vmotion for central VM Migration / deployment?

What SAN kit are you planning on?

bigredshark · 16 Apr 2008 at 20:17

TrX said:
Fun projects ahead, vmware + SAN is pretty nice. Rolling out vmotion for central VM Migration / deployment?

What SAN kit are you planning on?

We have vmware and a SAN coming soon for a customer as well, I think we're just about sold on netapp now. The soon to be released (currently in beta) snapmanager for virtual infrastructure software is a really cool product for backups and snapshots!

TrX · 16 Apr 2008 at 20:34

bigredshark said:
We have vmware and a SAN coming soon for a customer as well, I think we're just about sold on netapp now. The soon to be released (currently in beta) snapmanager for virtual infrastructure software is a really cool product for backups and snapshots!

VMotion does snapshots/backups anyway, and can happily be put onto a FC/iSCSI san target. Netapp.. interesting choice, may I ask the reasoning?

Btw, do you know what SAN switch vendor netapp use?

bigredshark · 16 Apr 2008 at 20:40

TrX said:
VMotion does snapshots/backups anyway, and can happily be put onto a FC/iSCSI san target. Netapp.. interesting choice, may I ask the reasoning?

Btw, do you know what SAN switch vendor netapp use?

Netapp does them better, automated transfer to SAN on a DR site immediately after it's completed. Also more space efficient that vmotion snapshots.

God, I've started believing the hype...

Netapp because there's nobody with a better offering in terms of features, performance wise you can do a little better but not with equivilent feature set.

Switch wise they like Brocade (as every SAN vendor I've spoken to seems to), we'll likely use Cisco MDS boxes for FC connections and 4500's for iSCSI.

TrX · 16 Apr 2008 at 20:43

bigredshark said:
Netapp does them better, automated transfer to SAN on a DR site immediately after it's completed. Also more space efficient that vmotion snapshots.

God, I've started believing the hype...

Netapp because there's nobody with a better offering in terms of features, performance wise you can do a little better but not with equivilent feature set.

Switch wise they like Brocade (as every SAN vendor I've spoken to seems to), we'll likely use Cisco MDS boxes for FC connections and 4500's for iSCSI.

Have used cisco MDS, brocades, qlogic and sun's stuff. Cisco is nice because it's comfortable, qlogic has the most friendly mgmnt interface, but brocade do some damn nice director level switches, specially now they have bought McData. Recently been playing with 2 of their new DCX backbone switches, damn nice!

bigredshark · 16 Apr 2008 at 21:17

TrX said:
Have used cisco MDS, brocades, qlogic and sun's stuff. Cisco is nice because it's comfortable, qlogic has the most friendly mgmnt interface, but brocade do some damn nice director level switches, specially now they have bought McData. Recently been playing with 2 of their new DCX backbone switches, damn nice!

There's a lot of choice, we chose Cisco because we could integrate FCIP into the directors if we need to and I just couldn't face having yet another vendor to deal with.

TrX · 16 Apr 2008 at 21:26

bigredshark said:
There's a lot of choice, we chose Cisco because we could integrate FCIP into the directors if we need to and I just couldn't face having yet another vendor to deal with.

Brocade's to FCIP and IPFC too, but fair call with the vendor issue. My personal favorites are the cisco MDS's anyway... mainly because it's one less interface to remember

Curiosityx · 16 Apr 2008 at 21:34

Pokes 10Mb leased line......crys....