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scene.org - the network
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scene.org

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Scene.org is hosted and supported by:
Scene.org is sponsored by:
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Ok, last time I promised a followup on the server upgrade story, so here it is. This issue will be for the network tech junkies :)

Tuesday July 29th

Today we are going to replace a big part of the network infrastructure at work, and also the core switch to which the Scene.org server is hooked up. For the past one and a half year all your downloads were transported by the machine on the right, but now it will be replaced.

The Avaya P882 multilayer switch that will be replaced is great at layer 2 traffic, but lacks in robustness for layer 3 routing.

The old switch had 139Gbps FD backplane bandwidth and was equiped with 24 Gigabit GBIC fiber interfaces and 96 10/100 RJ45 interfaces.

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At 17:30 in the evening we started by removing the old switch from the rack and putting in the new core switch. We were going to repatch all cables and stuff, so the planned downtime was quite long. Around 22:15 all services were running again and you can check the result on the pictures below.
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The new switch is a powerfull Cisco Catalyst 6509 multilayer switch with 256Gbps backplane bandwidth (fully X-bar enabled) and offers 34 Gigabit GBIC fiber interfaces and 96 10/100/1000 RJ45 interfaces. So the entire chassis holds 130 Gigabit interfaces :)

Scene.org is now connected to one of the Gigabit copper interfaces (grey cables) so we will have a dedicated 1 Gigabit on the core switch.

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The Catalyst 6509 core switch is hooked up to a huge Cisco 12416 GSR router (pictures left and below) which is part of the SURFnet5 Gigaport backbone, the research and education network of The Netherlands.

The entire router was too big to fit on one picture, so you'll have to make due with my not so talented photo skills :)
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If you zoom in on the picture on the right you will see the two blades in it are OC192 fiber blades. These two 10Gbit/s interfaces transport all our traffic from Rotterdam to Amsterdam where the SURFnet5 collapsed backbone is located at SARA. Here the traffic can take a few different routes:

  • Over the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) which is connected with 2Gbit/s
  • Through the European researchnetwork GEANT which is connected with 10Gbit/s
  • Or all the way to the US via the Abilene/Internet2 node in New York which is connected with 10Gbit/s

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Ok, so now you know what route your downloaded demos have taken to reach you :) We are planning a big move of the current colocation fascility to a new building early 2004, so I think that will be the subject of the third issue in this series...

posted by Redhound
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