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Clients and servers are connected by a variety of wires, cables, switches, and protocols.
We will look at our situation here and discuss the underlying model at work.

To prepare yourselves for the networks session

Now for networks

We'll start with an intro to the networking here in SILS then we'll look at a roadmap of the wires and boxes which connect us to the internet.

Campus Network Connectivity and Speeds

The UNC-Chapel Hill data network currently supports over 40,000 users with approximately 90,000 connected devices in over 300 buildings with a minimum of gigabit interconnectivity between buildings. The core routing architecture consists of a Cisco VSS infrastructure with 40 Gbps interswitch connectivity and multiple 10 Gbps links to redundant border routers. From the core VSS router platform, dual 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps links feed distribution layer switches across campus.

UNC-Chapel Hill connects to the statewide network, NCREN (North Carolina Research and Education Network), that provides connectivity to all schools in the UNC system, all K-12 schools in the state of North Carolina, many private colleges and universities, community colleges, state government, and the North Carolina TeleHealth Network (NCTN). Through NCREN, UNC-Chapel Hill connects via IPv4 and IPv6 to Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail for connectivity to other universities across the country and to CenturyLink and Level3 for commodity Internet services. NCREN provides dual 10G connections to Internet2 in both Charlotte and Research Triangle Park, a 10G connection to NLR in Raleigh, and commodity Internet 10G connections to Level3 (in Charlotte and Research Triangle Park) and CenturyLink (in Research Triangle Park and Winston-Salem). In turn, UNC-Chapel Hill has separate active 10G links to NCREN out of two different on-campus data centers with diverse paths.

networks | inter-networks | paths | IP v. URL addressing | next session