Status Report - September 8, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 8, 2008:

This blog is now being published at http://nocblog.areon.net

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The formal Best and Final Offer request was submitted to the top three vendors using a format approved by the UAF purchasing office on September 3. We asked each vendor to alter their designs somewhat to conform to changes that have taken place in our network design since last March. The vendors’ proposals are due Tuesday, September 9, at 2:30 pm. A conference call during which the evaluation committee will make its final recommendation is to take place either on Thursday or Friday.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: I had a conference call with McLeod last Thursday, September 4, to answer questions leading up to the completion of the exhibits required for the new IRU. I will submit the final revision of the splice point and collocation request form on Monday, September 8. McLeod should have the agreement ready for signature by mid-week.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 9, in Little Rock with the City of Little Rock, UALR, UAMS, and ARE-ON staff and legal counsels to go over the latest draft of the agreement with TWTC. I will be attending the meeting. Bill Kincaid, UA legal counsel in Fayetteville, will participate by telephone. Melissa Rust from the UA System Office will also attend the meeting.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a status report last Thursday on their progress. Ritter has a meeting planned with WEHCO Video on Friday, September 12, to review the overall requirements for our project, as well as additional needs that Ritter has. Ritter hopes to have a proposal back from WEHCO within a week. Ritter will work with us on the details on their agreement with WEHCO to ensure that it meets our needs as well as theirs. We should receive the first draft of our agreement with Ritter once the WEHCO agreement is settled.

Part of this project is some new fiber between Harrisburg and Wynne, plus the fiber that is to be built to our McLeod and Level3 fiber POPs near Forrest City. The fiber for the project is expected to arrive on October 6. Ritter is also working with the Highway Department and Entergy on easements and pole attachments, as well as ASU on the connection on the Jonesboro campus.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: We are still waiting on final confirmation about the location of MBO fiber in the Van Buren area. Scott Ramoly has contacted Charlie Pickle from MBO several times, and he is awaiting feedback from Cox who manages the fiber. Scott will be visiting the location on Monday, September 8, with CT&T to do the preliminary engineering for the fiber build that will splice the MBO fiber to our McLeod fiber.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper MX routers were delivered on Thursday, September 4. We hauled the routers over to the Harmon parking deck on Friday and racked all but one of the MX960 routers (it will go into the same place as the Force10 E600i when we complete the migration to the new Fayetteville MX960, which is anticipated by the end of September). We will power up the routers either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and begin the process of configuring and testing them. Steven Karp captured time-lapse photos of the installation process and is assembling them into movies that we will post on Youtube. Here is Part 1 of the video showing the installation of the racks and the MX routers:



The line cards for the MX routers are the only components that we have not received. Juniper says that they were shipped from China and should be here by the end of this week.

Following our issue with Qwest’s internal order processing delays for our Juniper equipment, Qwest representatives will be in Fayetteville to meet with us on Tuesday, September 16. We also plan to use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss ARE-ON futures, especially as regards our members’ acquisition of additional Juniper routers and our eligibility for Quilt discounting.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly will start touring cities with CT&T beginning Monday, September 8, as CT&T prepares the preliminary estimate for the cost of our fiber laterals to the university campuses. First up will be Russellville and Van Buren. CT&T advised us of a bridge renovation that will take place west of Russellville that will impact our build to one of the two Russellville splice points. We are also seeking advice from CT&T on filament counts and fiber type to use for our lateral builds. We will be purchasing our own stock to use for the actual construction.

9. ADSB Network: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly worked with Sean Bruce in UAF network services to install the patch cables in the various buildings in the fiber path between the Administrative Services Building and the Harmon Parking Deck. Some of the connections are temporary pending arrival of a new adapter for our new fiber scopes. Steven has one Juniper EX4200 racked up in our building, which he will configure and test this coming week. Once we have the link to the Harmon Parking Deck running, we will patch each of the Ethernet jacks in our offices into the EX4200, effectively removing our offices from the UAF campus network. This will enable us to do network management independently of the campus network. It will require all of our IP addresses to change, but that should not present a problem. The Wi-Fi connections will remain connected through the campus network, though.

10. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us.

11. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The changes in IP addresses for the LifeSize units will take place as soon as we can get the fiber link between our building and the Harmon parking deck completed. The units will then get their new, permanent IP addresses. We will ask the UAF folks to leave the systems in the DHCP tables so that we can move the units to another office or conference room in the building (thus necessitating connections through the campus network).

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 still awaiting approval from Cisco on the use of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for our BGP and routing workshop. We have requested use of their facilities on either October 8th or 22nd. Since the ARE-ON steering committee meeting is tentatively planned for October 7th, I think it makes sense to push for the 8th. Cisco was in national sales meetings this past week, so we should hear from them this week on our request. Steven and I will team teach this workshop.

14. Document Reviews: I have reviewed the new ARE-ON member MOU and Management Council documents with Steven and Scott. We have a number of changes suggested for the MOU that will help clarify several IP address issues.

15. Quilt NOC Tools Videoconference Workshop: We have registered to participate in the Quilt NOC Tools Workshop on Wednesday, September 10. This is the first Quilt workshop conducted by videoconference, which will save a lot of money on travel, plus permit more people to participate. The installation of our LifeSize units is most timely! We have talked off and on about what software tools we want to deploy in the NOC to do various tasks from network monitoring, configuration management, trouble ticketing, etc. This workshop will help us better understand what tools are in use at other regional optical networks.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network