Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 25, 2008:
1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee will meet on August 27 at the UA System Office in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:
08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We received an email from our McLeod/Paetec representative on Friday saying that they will have the IRU appendix ready early this coming week. They are currently reviewing our list of desired splice points along the Little Rock/Monroe route and the Memphis/Tulsa route. This, plus the requests for collocation, will be incorporated into the new appendix.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The Little Rock city attorney is apparently still reviewing what he characterized as “a rather curious draft” of the agreement with Time Warner Telecom. He did not respond to my offer to meet with him while in Little Rock this past Wednesday. I am very concerned about the lack of progress.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I had a very good meeting in Jonesboro with Paul Waits and some of his staff from Ritter Communications last Tuesday. For several reasons, Ritter has returned to their original idea of extending their fiber from Wynne to the Forrest City area rather than tying into splice points in the West Memphis area. Ritter is pursuing a new opportunity to acquire fiber from a cable TV provider that has existing fiber between Wynne and Forrest City rather than having to build new fiber. Ritter will also have to replace some of their fiber between Harrisburg and Wynne since they are at capacity. Paul Waits felt that they would have this completed by the end of the calendar year. Ritter will build to both the Level3 and McLeod regen sites in Widener (near Forrest City) as a part of the deal.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).
6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I went to Van Buren this past Friday to look at the feasibility of splicing our MBO fiber into our McLeod fiber. We were very encouraged to find the McLeod splice point, which is around 2000 feet from the MBO fiber. We found a good location for the fiber hut that will have to be built, but it’s on Arkansas highway department property. That will require some negotiation. MBO has expressed no interest or need for this fiber or hut, so we will add this build to the list for McClelland Engineering.
7. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp has been at a Juniper class all of the past week. We will begin installing the EX4200 switches this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship this coming Friday, August 29. We will have a very busy week installing these routers when they arrive.
8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Immediately after our staff meeting on Monday morning I will be in contact with Facilities Management to press for the meeting with McClelland/CT&T that was to have taken place over a week ago to get the engineering fee and contract established. Scott Ramoly has completed the updates to the preliminary documents we will deliver to McClelland detailing the fiber laterals we need built.
9. NOC: Steven, Scott, and I will meet this week to draw up a preliminary list of services that we will need for 24x7x365 NOC support. We will base this on the document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us. I will also contact the University’s purchasing division to get an understanding of what we will need to establish an outsourced contract. It’s highly likely that we will need to do an RFP.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The TV stands have arrived, and we have one of them assembled in Mike’s office. But we have not yet received the LifeSize units. I contacted the vendor, Comm3, and got a reply over the weekend that LifeSize had delayed shipment. We will get a shipping update on Monday from Comm3.
11. iPhones: Steven and Scott have received their iPhones, but I am still waiting on mine to be delivered.
12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
13. Workshops: We have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.
14. State Technology Council: I attended a luncheon meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock. Claire Bailey visualizes a state technology plan that echoes Gov. Beebe’s vision for the state, including educational advancement, economic development, protecting the future, and providing meaningful tax relief. There were discussions of technology procurement procedures and an enterprise architecture. Putting something like this together in such a way as to be usable across the spectrum of state agencies, public schools, and higher education institutions will be a real challenge. There is no hope to have this completed prior to the start of the legislative session. The opening meeting for the Council will probably take place in September at the UA Cooperative Extension Service campus in Little Rock with Gov. Beebe attending.
15. Monticello Meeting: Mike Abbiatti, Bill Ashmore, and I attended meetings at the University of Arkansas at Monticello this past Thursday. We had opportunities to meet with top UAM management, faculty, staff, and a few students to give them insight into what ARE-ON is, how their campus can benefit from ARE-ON, and to hear back from them about their needs. The UAM networking folks have made great strides in preparing their campus network for the ARE-ON connection. They have completed a new communications building that will serve as the ARE-ON demarc. Also completed and recently tested is a new campus fiber ring.
Written as the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony was in progress.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Status Report - August 18, 2008
Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 18, 2008:
1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:
08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We have been working with the McLeod/Paetec representatives on the appendix to the existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. We will have the list of desired splice point locations and diagrams to McLeod on August 18, which should complete the list of exhibits necessary to complete the appendix.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I got another update this weekend from the Little Rock city attorney on the status of this agreement. He had received another draft from Time Warner Telecom, but his team had yet to complete its review due to other city business. I offered to meet with him when I am in Little Rock this Wednesday.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Paul Waits of Ritter Communications in Jonesboro on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked him for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: A meeting with McLeod/Paetec, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, AT&T, OneNet, and an engineer from the City of Tulsa was held on August 6 to determine how to connect our McLeod fiber to the OneNet POP at the OSU Tulsa campus. The plan was to splice OneNet/INFO fiber in Manhole 1081 in front of the AT&T building to our McLeod fiber in a different manhole in front of the same AT&T building. This necessitated bringing both fibers into the building, but AT&T closed the door on that option when it said that its policy prohibited connecting private network inside their facilities. We have tabled this to pursue a better solution with MBO in the Van Buren area (see below).
6. Van Buren/MBO: We have identified a splice point on the McLeod fiber at the I-40/I-540 exchange in Van Buren near where our MBO fiber crosses I-40. Scott Ramoly and I have another conference call scheduled with MBO’s engineer for August 18 to further investigate the feasibility of building a fiber hut and building fiber to splice the McLeod and MBO fiber. Doing so will potentially eliminate the need for McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa project above, plus it has the technical advantage of reducing the fiber route for our Little Rock/Fayetteville wavelengths by a couple of hundred miles.
7. Juniper Routers: Some of the Juniper equipment (the smaller EX4200 switches) have shipped and should arrive the beginning of this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship August 29. Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia this week (August 18-22). The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed at the Harmon parking deck, plus the new Dell racks are on-site. The cut-tiles for the racks should be ready August 18. Scott Ramoly will complete the installation of the racks and final cable ladders while Steven is in class this week. Steven has been conversing with OneNet about the temporary use of a second 10G port on their border router to facilitate the migration to the new MX960 router. OneNet has been very helpful to us throughout our planning. They have agreed to do some special routing configurations for us that make our routing model work for the ARE-ON membership.
8. Fiber Laterals Construction: We anticipated having the preliminary fee estimate from the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T last Friday (August 15) so that a contract and statement of work could be negotiated and finalized, but Facilities Management had not received the estimate at last word on Friday. I asked Bob Beeler of Facilities Management to get us to the stage where we could meet with McClelland when I return on Friday, August 22, to begin the detailed statement of work for planning and constructing the fiber laterals. Scott Ramoly has started working on updates to the documents that we will deliver to McClelland describing each of the fiber routes to be built.
9. NOC: As promised Steve Peck from the Indiana University Global NOC sent me a document listing the types of services that they offer. They are very receptive to building a proposal for after hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON so that we can be assured that our telephone will be answered by network engineering staff 24x7x365. Additional conference calls are planned. It is likely that we will have to put out an RFP for these services, although the GRNOC has some very intriguing unique software in their toolset that we are anxious to get our hands on.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize units and TV stands should arrive the week of August 18-22. The timing on the installation should coincide with the installation of the new Juniper EX4200 switches the following week so that each of the two LifeSize units in our building will have ARE-ON IP addresses.
11. iPhones: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly received their iPhones this past week; I should receive mine this week (unfortunately, I will be out of town for most of the week). The browser on the iPhone has very good support for PNG graphics files, which is a major consideration for us switching to the iPhone. Many of our network management systems use PNG files for graphs, and these were simply unreadable due to extremely primitive support in the Windows Mobile platform. Steven is investigating a Secure Shell client, which is another important feature for us. Having mobile access into our equipment wherever we are without having to have a laptop will be very important to our responsiveness in a critical outage setting.
12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
13. Workshops: We have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.
14. Listservs: New listservs for ARE-ON are now ready for use:
AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list (**)
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list
(** The AREON-L list is being used for another purpose, but will be available by the end of August for open subscription.)
15. State Technology Council: I will be attending the first meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock.
16. Director of Administration and Planning: Our engineering team had the opportunity to meet with and interview the leading candidate for the new position on August 14.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:
08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We have been working with the McLeod/Paetec representatives on the appendix to the existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. We will have the list of desired splice point locations and diagrams to McLeod on August 18, which should complete the list of exhibits necessary to complete the appendix.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I got another update this weekend from the Little Rock city attorney on the status of this agreement. He had received another draft from Time Warner Telecom, but his team had yet to complete its review due to other city business. I offered to meet with him when I am in Little Rock this Wednesday.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Paul Waits of Ritter Communications in Jonesboro on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked him for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: A meeting with McLeod/Paetec, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, AT&T, OneNet, and an engineer from the City of Tulsa was held on August 6 to determine how to connect our McLeod fiber to the OneNet POP at the OSU Tulsa campus. The plan was to splice OneNet/INFO fiber in Manhole 1081 in front of the AT&T building to our McLeod fiber in a different manhole in front of the same AT&T building. This necessitated bringing both fibers into the building, but AT&T closed the door on that option when it said that its policy prohibited connecting private network inside their facilities. We have tabled this to pursue a better solution with MBO in the Van Buren area (see below).
6. Van Buren/MBO: We have identified a splice point on the McLeod fiber at the I-40/I-540 exchange in Van Buren near where our MBO fiber crosses I-40. Scott Ramoly and I have another conference call scheduled with MBO’s engineer for August 18 to further investigate the feasibility of building a fiber hut and building fiber to splice the McLeod and MBO fiber. Doing so will potentially eliminate the need for McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa project above, plus it has the technical advantage of reducing the fiber route for our Little Rock/Fayetteville wavelengths by a couple of hundred miles.
7. Juniper Routers: Some of the Juniper equipment (the smaller EX4200 switches) have shipped and should arrive the beginning of this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship August 29. Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia this week (August 18-22). The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed at the Harmon parking deck, plus the new Dell racks are on-site. The cut-tiles for the racks should be ready August 18. Scott Ramoly will complete the installation of the racks and final cable ladders while Steven is in class this week. Steven has been conversing with OneNet about the temporary use of a second 10G port on their border router to facilitate the migration to the new MX960 router. OneNet has been very helpful to us throughout our planning. They have agreed to do some special routing configurations for us that make our routing model work for the ARE-ON membership.
8. Fiber Laterals Construction: We anticipated having the preliminary fee estimate from the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T last Friday (August 15) so that a contract and statement of work could be negotiated and finalized, but Facilities Management had not received the estimate at last word on Friday. I asked Bob Beeler of Facilities Management to get us to the stage where we could meet with McClelland when I return on Friday, August 22, to begin the detailed statement of work for planning and constructing the fiber laterals. Scott Ramoly has started working on updates to the documents that we will deliver to McClelland describing each of the fiber routes to be built.
9. NOC: As promised Steve Peck from the Indiana University Global NOC sent me a document listing the types of services that they offer. They are very receptive to building a proposal for after hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON so that we can be assured that our telephone will be answered by network engineering staff 24x7x365. Additional conference calls are planned. It is likely that we will have to put out an RFP for these services, although the GRNOC has some very intriguing unique software in their toolset that we are anxious to get our hands on.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize units and TV stands should arrive the week of August 18-22. The timing on the installation should coincide with the installation of the new Juniper EX4200 switches the following week so that each of the two LifeSize units in our building will have ARE-ON IP addresses.
11. iPhones: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly received their iPhones this past week; I should receive mine this week (unfortunately, I will be out of town for most of the week). The browser on the iPhone has very good support for PNG graphics files, which is a major consideration for us switching to the iPhone. Many of our network management systems use PNG files for graphs, and these were simply unreadable due to extremely primitive support in the Windows Mobile platform. Steven is investigating a Secure Shell client, which is another important feature for us. Having mobile access into our equipment wherever we are without having to have a laptop will be very important to our responsiveness in a critical outage setting.
12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
13. Workshops: We have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.
14. Listservs: New listservs for ARE-ON are now ready for use:
AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list (**)
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list
(** The AREON-L list is being used for another purpose, but will be available by the end of August for open subscription.)
15. State Technology Council: I will be attending the first meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock.
16. Director of Administration and Planning: Our engineering team had the opportunity to meet with and interview the leading candidate for the new position on August 14.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Status Report - August 11, 2008
Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 11, 2008:
1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. These vendors are (in alphabetical order) ADVA Optical Networking, AT&T (Cisco), and ePlus Technology (Cisco). The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We are still awaiting the new appendix for our existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. I have asked the Monroe sales rep to have this wrapped up by the end of this week (August 15).
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: Based on the last update that we received (August 4) from the City attorney, the agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review. TWTC was awaiting the return of a key reviewer from maternity leave.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have our meeting with Ritter on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are still awaiting word from McLeod and Indian Nations Fiber Optic on the issue of taking our McLeod fiber and the end of the INFO/OneNet fiber in MH1081 into the AT&T building. The Van Buren/MBO discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.
6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I had a conference call with MBO’s engineer last Thursday (August 7) during which we discussed possibly building a splice between our MBO fiber and McLeod fiber in the Van Buren/Alma area. Our MBO Fayetteville/Fort Smith fiber route passes about 3000 feet from a McLeod splice point, which may be an ideal location for us to join the two fibers. It would probably necessitate building a fiber hut in the vicinity. If we can pull this off, we will eliminate the need to do the McLeod/OneNet project in Tulsa, plus we can save substantial dollars in the optical network design by not having to send our Little Rock/Fayetteville traffic to Tulsa and back.
7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed. We anticipate arrival of the new racks to house the equipment this week. Steven has met with the UAF network staff and they have a migration plan for installing our new Fayetteville core Juniper MX960 and migrating the campus connection off the Force10 router.
8. Fiber Construction: We met with Facilities Management and the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T on Thursday (August 7) to initiate the contract and fee negotiation. McClelland plans to have the numbers ready for a preliminary budget by Friday, August 15. They are ready to begin the engineering and design as soon as the contract is approved. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.
9. NOC: We had a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on Thursday (August 7) during which we had a brief discussion about the possibility of using the GRNOC for off-hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON. They have a rather comprehensive set of NOC services available, most of which are outlined in a document they sent us that describes their service focus areas. We plan additional conference calls to develop a proposal and cost estimate.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased, as have two TV stands. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet. A new conference table has been installed in Mike’s office.
11. iPhones: We are still awaiting the arrival of the new iPhones for Steven, Scott, and David.
12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
13. Workshops: We are kicking around ideas of workshops that we will host for our ARE-ON member campuses and interested parties. The following are a few of the ideas under consideration. The Routing and BGP Training class will be scheduled for mid-September. Cisco has offered to let us use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for that class, which will enable the use of live Cisco routers as well as our own Juniper lab routers during the class.
Routing and BGP Training
ARE-ON Network Operations Center (trouble reporting, network statistics, etc.)
Introduction to National Research Networks (Internet2 and National LambdaRail)
IPv4 Multicast Training
IPv6 Training
Identity Management, Federations, and Shibboleth
Traffic Engineering
Network Performance Workshop for Network Engineers
Network Performance Workshop for Applications and Research Staff
Visualization
DNSSEC Implementation
Security and Privacy Topics in Higher Education and ARE-ON
High Performance Computing for the Network Engineer
Extending Storage Area Networks over the WAN
Video Conferencing Implementation
14. Listservs: Requests to create new listservs for ARE-ON discussions have been submitted:
AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. These vendors are (in alphabetical order) ADVA Optical Networking, AT&T (Cisco), and ePlus Technology (Cisco). The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We are still awaiting the new appendix for our existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. I have asked the Monroe sales rep to have this wrapped up by the end of this week (August 15).
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: Based on the last update that we received (August 4) from the City attorney, the agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review. TWTC was awaiting the return of a key reviewer from maternity leave.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have our meeting with Ritter on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are still awaiting word from McLeod and Indian Nations Fiber Optic on the issue of taking our McLeod fiber and the end of the INFO/OneNet fiber in MH1081 into the AT&T building. The Van Buren/MBO discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.
6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I had a conference call with MBO’s engineer last Thursday (August 7) during which we discussed possibly building a splice between our MBO fiber and McLeod fiber in the Van Buren/Alma area. Our MBO Fayetteville/Fort Smith fiber route passes about 3000 feet from a McLeod splice point, which may be an ideal location for us to join the two fibers. It would probably necessitate building a fiber hut in the vicinity. If we can pull this off, we will eliminate the need to do the McLeod/OneNet project in Tulsa, plus we can save substantial dollars in the optical network design by not having to send our Little Rock/Fayetteville traffic to Tulsa and back.
7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed. We anticipate arrival of the new racks to house the equipment this week. Steven has met with the UAF network staff and they have a migration plan for installing our new Fayetteville core Juniper MX960 and migrating the campus connection off the Force10 router.
8. Fiber Construction: We met with Facilities Management and the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T on Thursday (August 7) to initiate the contract and fee negotiation. McClelland plans to have the numbers ready for a preliminary budget by Friday, August 15. They are ready to begin the engineering and design as soon as the contract is approved. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.
9. NOC: We had a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on Thursday (August 7) during which we had a brief discussion about the possibility of using the GRNOC for off-hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON. They have a rather comprehensive set of NOC services available, most of which are outlined in a document they sent us that describes their service focus areas. We plan additional conference calls to develop a proposal and cost estimate.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased, as have two TV stands. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet. A new conference table has been installed in Mike’s office.
11. iPhones: We are still awaiting the arrival of the new iPhones for Steven, Scott, and David.
12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
13. Workshops: We are kicking around ideas of workshops that we will host for our ARE-ON member campuses and interested parties. The following are a few of the ideas under consideration. The Routing and BGP Training class will be scheduled for mid-September. Cisco has offered to let us use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for that class, which will enable the use of live Cisco routers as well as our own Juniper lab routers during the class.
Routing and BGP Training
ARE-ON Network Operations Center (trouble reporting, network statistics, etc.)
Introduction to National Research Networks (Internet2 and National LambdaRail)
IPv4 Multicast Training
IPv6 Training
Identity Management, Federations, and Shibboleth
Traffic Engineering
Network Performance Workshop for Network Engineers
Network Performance Workshop for Applications and Research Staff
Visualization
DNSSEC Implementation
Security and Privacy Topics in Higher Education and ARE-ON
High Performance Computing for the Network Engineer
Extending Storage Area Networks over the WAN
Video Conferencing Implementation
14. Listservs: Requests to create new listservs for ARE-ON discussions have been submitted:
AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
Friday, August 8, 2008
Status Report - August 6, 2008
Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 6, 2008:
1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is meeting with the top three vendors on August 27 (tentatively) where we will get final presentations, Q&A, and a best & final offer using our latest network design. The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: After getting the word from AT&T that we were not going to be able to use their fiber, I got McLeod to give us a quote. It came in at $XXXX/strand/mile. Last year it was $YYY/strand/mile. I asked the rep to sharpen his pencil, hoping that we could get the $YYY price back, and didn’t hear back from him for quite a while. Last week I pinged him again, and he wrote back with a new quote at $ZZZZ/strand/mile. Maintenance is $AAA/mile/year. I asked him to draw up the paperwork, which will be a simple amendment to our existing IRU contract.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review of the last revision from the City. We are awaiting the return of a Time Warner reviewer from maternity leave.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Ritter Communications on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: Scott Ramoly and I went to Tulsa on August 6 to meet with McLeod, AT&T, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, OneNet, and a City of Tulsa engineer about connecting the end of our McLeod fiber to OneNet fiber to reach the OneNet demarc at the OSU Tulsa campus. There were several options discussed, the most logical one being to take the ends of the McLeod fiber and the OneNet/INFO fiber into the AT&T building, but every indication is that AT&T may be a roadblock. It’s apparently a ILEC vs. CLEC issue. We may be able to get around this telco regulation stuff by approaching AT&T as two higher ed networks needing connectivity. If we get into a jam, we might want to get Kevin Kremer, the AT&T VP that we met with last week to look into this for us. The Van Buren discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.
6. Van Buren/MBO: We have MBO fiber that goes from Fayetteville to Fort Smith to Tulsa, and McLeod fiber that goes from Little Rock to Fort Smith to Tulsa. We have initiated discussions with MBO about possibly tying these two together near where they cross somewhere in the Alma and Van Buren area. We have provided information to MBO and are trying to schedule a conference call with them this week to go over our ideas and listen to their solutions. If we can make this work, we can avoid having to light the McLeod fiber between Fort Smith and Tulsa and shorten the path that lambdas take between Fayetteville and Tulsa by a couple of hundred miles. We want to use cost savings in Tulsa to pay for this.
7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The racks, fiber patches, cable ladders and fiber management, power, etc. for installing these have already been ordered and will be ready before the Juniper equipment arrives. We will immediately install the routers and schedule a brief outage to migrate our existing network links off the Force10 to the Juniper MX960.
8. Fiber Construction: The approval for the selection of McClelland/CT&T as the engineering firm came through Dr. Sugg’s office. We have a meeting with the company on August 7 to negotiate their fee and to get a contract in place. Facilities Management is driving this process, with our participation and guidance. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.
9. NOC: We have a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on August 7. We will work with them to develop a proposal for off-hours/weekend/holiday NOC coverage. The intent will be to have someone who can answer the phone, do preliminary vetting of the caller, do some preliminary troubleshooting, and notify the ARE-ON on-call engineer. The GRNOC may also do some alarm monitoring for us, but we might just as easily do that ourselves.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased. I will be selecting the stand that the units in our building will go on on August 7. I have a recommendation on a nice portable stand. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet.
11. Cisco Telepresence: Steven Karp and I went to the Cisco office in Bentonville this morning to see a demo of their Telepresence Center. It’s really attractive technology. We talked with Cisco about the possibility of placing a unit on campus in a technology preview center. They felt that we might be able to get financial support from some large companies in the area and state.
12. iPhones: Ordered for Steven, Scott, and David. We will check them out to be sure that they work before we order Mike's.
13. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON)
1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is meeting with the top three vendors on August 27 (tentatively) where we will get final presentations, Q&A, and a best & final offer using our latest network design. The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.
2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: After getting the word from AT&T that we were not going to be able to use their fiber, I got McLeod to give us a quote. It came in at $XXXX/strand/mile. Last year it was $YYY/strand/mile. I asked the rep to sharpen his pencil, hoping that we could get the $YYY price back, and didn’t hear back from him for quite a while. Last week I pinged him again, and he wrote back with a new quote at $ZZZZ/strand/mile. Maintenance is $AAA/mile/year. I asked him to draw up the paperwork, which will be a simple amendment to our existing IRU contract.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review of the last revision from the City. We are awaiting the return of a Time Warner reviewer from maternity leave.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Ritter Communications on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.
5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: Scott Ramoly and I went to Tulsa on August 6 to meet with McLeod, AT&T, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, OneNet, and a City of Tulsa engineer about connecting the end of our McLeod fiber to OneNet fiber to reach the OneNet demarc at the OSU Tulsa campus. There were several options discussed, the most logical one being to take the ends of the McLeod fiber and the OneNet/INFO fiber into the AT&T building, but every indication is that AT&T may be a roadblock. It’s apparently a ILEC vs. CLEC issue. We may be able to get around this telco regulation stuff by approaching AT&T as two higher ed networks needing connectivity. If we get into a jam, we might want to get Kevin Kremer, the AT&T VP that we met with last week to look into this for us. The Van Buren discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.
6. Van Buren/MBO: We have MBO fiber that goes from Fayetteville to Fort Smith to Tulsa, and McLeod fiber that goes from Little Rock to Fort Smith to Tulsa. We have initiated discussions with MBO about possibly tying these two together near where they cross somewhere in the Alma and Van Buren area. We have provided information to MBO and are trying to schedule a conference call with them this week to go over our ideas and listen to their solutions. If we can make this work, we can avoid having to light the McLeod fiber between Fort Smith and Tulsa and shorten the path that lambdas take between Fayetteville and Tulsa by a couple of hundred miles. We want to use cost savings in Tulsa to pay for this.
7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The racks, fiber patches, cable ladders and fiber management, power, etc. for installing these have already been ordered and will be ready before the Juniper equipment arrives. We will immediately install the routers and schedule a brief outage to migrate our existing network links off the Force10 to the Juniper MX960.
8. Fiber Construction: The approval for the selection of McClelland/CT&T as the engineering firm came through Dr. Sugg’s office. We have a meeting with the company on August 7 to negotiate their fee and to get a contract in place. Facilities Management is driving this process, with our participation and guidance. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.
9. NOC: We have a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on August 7. We will work with them to develop a proposal for off-hours/weekend/holiday NOC coverage. The intent will be to have someone who can answer the phone, do preliminary vetting of the caller, do some preliminary troubleshooting, and notify the ARE-ON on-call engineer. The GRNOC may also do some alarm monitoring for us, but we might just as easily do that ourselves.
10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased. I will be selecting the stand that the units in our building will go on on August 7. I have a recommendation on a nice portable stand. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet.
11. Cisco Telepresence: Steven Karp and I went to the Cisco office in Bentonville this morning to see a demo of their Telepresence Center. It’s really attractive technology. We talked with Cisco about the possibility of placing a unit on campus in a technology preview center. They felt that we might be able to get financial support from some large companies in the area and state.
12. iPhones: Ordered for Steven, Scott, and David. We will check them out to be sure that they work before we order Mike's.
13. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON)
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