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