Preparing for a new network

Here at Mount we are at the beginning stages of gearing up for a new network. The last upgrade for us was fundamentally performed in 2004. At that time we had our FDDI ring 10meg hub network replaced with a Ethernet network with 10gig link between cores and 1000meg to most of the desktop. At that time wireless was in its infancy so a small wireless install was added to the residence halls as a supplement to the wired network. Since then, additional buildings have been added with newer electronics installed during building as well as additional wireless upgrades as funding was available.

We are currently faced with the dilemma that our core electronics will not support IPv6 routing preventing us from being able to deploy IPv6 natively. We are also facing the end of support on the majority of our current electronics.

All of this brings us to the current point in time where we are starting to get the specs and pricing for upgrading the current network. Some of the key points we are looking at are:

• transition to having the wireless network be the primary ingress point for end users.
• reduce the year to year maintenance costs
• reduce the number of wired ports in many buildings to reduce up front purchase costs

To do this we are using the management system of our current vendor Enterasys. The starting point was to use their Inventory Manager product to get a list of the port usage used on all devices over the past several months giving us accurate usage.

Our plan is to take this number and increase the current usage number by 25% to anticipate increased wireless and systems ports needed.

I am hoping to keep this blog a bit more updated as we go through this process.