The Network Administration team of IT Services, Amritapuri campus, has successfully upgraded the existing switching infrastructure provided to the campus, to a more modern and reliable method which has many advantages and benefits associated with it. Earlier, the Core Switching Infrastructure existed in 1 Gigabit Ethernet with a stack of multiple switches of 128 Gbps switch fabric bandwidth. The main distribution switches were connected in a traditional method without redundancy.
BEHIND THE SCENES- DEVELOPING TESTING & IMPLEMENTATION
The 4 member team, led by Mr. Anoop V.K., Head of IT Services, Amritapuri campus, has been working towards this goal for the past year, studying the latest technologies and products in the market, analyzing the current setup of existing working devices, plus forecasting future demands and enhancements required. In the course of planning and designing the new infrastructure, the team evaluated multiple vendor products and made in-depth comparisons to reach the right conclusion.
The very critical testing of the proposed design was planned and conducted in the work bench before deploying and therefore, it was possible for the team to deploy the devices in the live environment, with very minimal downtime. The upgrade to the very critical core switching infrastructure took less than 30 minutes and all of this was carried out during evening hours so as to not disrupt normal working hours for the end users.
The Network Administration team, under the supervision of Mr. Maheshkumar P.M., Senior Network Administrator, IT Services, Amritapuri campus, was involved in the migration process.
THE OUTCOME
The newly implemented infrastructure sees two high-end switches providing 40GbE and 10GbE backbone stacked together with a switch fabric bandwidth of 1280 Gbps. The result is tremendous improvement in availability and speed. The new distribution switches installed in the various buildings are connected with 10GbE backbone in protocol based redundancy with multiple links. All the server racks are equipped with 40GbE supported switches and connected to the core. The performance upgrade is applicable to the LAN and Server Farm.
The total switching bandwidth is properly distributed and the staff and students who are the end-users will get unhindered access without any bottlenecks at never before speeds.
HIGHLIGHTS
