Migration to Gigabit Ethernet and its effects

Gál Zoltán <zgal@cis.unideb.hu>

Debreceni Egyetem, Informatikai Szolgáltató Közp.

Karsai Andrea <kandrea@fox.klte.hu>

Debreceni Egyetem, Informatikai Szolgáltató Közp.

University of Debrecen was founded at 1st January 2001. There have been three university predecessors in title at different part of city, so it was necessary to establish an integrated Service Centre for Informatics (SCI). Hungarian academic network (HBONE) connection of our university increased to 2.5 Mbps at the end of last year. Our goal is to migrate the connection to Gigabit Ethernet between campuses of the university.

In three new buildings the Life and Social science institute, Library of University and the Service Centre for Informatics will work. A new student hostel will be built for 1500 students, in which all rooms will have Internet connection.

Because of the new buildings, the number of connected IP hosts will increase with 3000 nodes. Current building of the SCI is the root of the star/tree MAN network and is regional centre of the HBONE also. Moving SCI into new building needs very careful physical LAN and bandwidth migration considerations. In the new buildings more than 1000 phone devices are planned to be set up, so it is worth to consider IP telephony introduction. The MAN backbone of the university needs to be extended at different places with wireless LAN connections. These connect small remote campuses, and solve connection from home for lecturers and researchers. Because of the increased bandwidth, computer viruses and cracking activities form the Internet we had also to install a firewall to protect the university network. Due to the exponential increase of the nodes it was necessary to extend our IP range with private IP addresses. The mentioned firewall provides NAT service for resolving our IP address problems.

Considering fast increase with 3000 of the number of university’s IP nodes, significant increase of the number of phone devices and 16 times bandwidth enlarging of the HBONE connection the presentation demonstrates a migration plan of the telephony and data transmission network at the University of Debrecen.