ITS upgrades network speeds across many south side buildings

What can you accomplish with 10 times faster network speeds? Students, faculty and staff at Case Western Reserve University can operationalize 10 Gigabits per second network connectivity in more campus buildings. From midnight to 6 a.m. last Thursday, Information Technology Services (ITS) upgraded the network distribution hub in Bingham Building to support 10 Gbps speeds. The hub controls network connectivity to a variety of buildings on the south side of campus including:

• Bingham Building
• A.W. Smith Building
• Kent Hale Smith Building
• Millis Building
• Strosacker Auditorium
• Wickenden Building
• Sears Library
• Nord Hall
• University West
• Cedar Avenue Service Center
• Greenhouse Building (Art Studio)
• Veale Athletic Center

The upgrade represents the final component of a National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) award that Case Western Reserve received in 2013. The CC-NIE program promotes cutting-edge network engineering to enable data-intensive research on university campuses. Through upgrades to the university network, researchers at Case Western Reserve can more easily move large volumes of data within the campus network and between the campus and external resources, including regional and national supercomputing facilities. The enhanced network will potentially attract new faculty involved in computationally and data-intensive research, and it will reduce barriers to collaborative data sharing among campus research groups. “Providing advanced infrastructure is critical to our research community, who rely on the network to push their investigations past typical boundaries,” Sue B. Workman, vice president of ITS and chief information officer for Case Western Reserve, said. “Upgrading to 10 Gbps is just the first step toward developing a next-generation network that can accelerate research and big data.” Past improvements funded by the CC-NIE grant include the upgrade of the university’s Internet2 connectivity to 100 Gbps, the creation of a Science DMZ to improve large-volume data transfers and the prior upgrade of five other campus buildings—Glennan Building, White Building, Rockefeller Building, Olin Building and Wood Building—to network speeds of 10 Gbps. Roger Bielefeld, senior director of the ITS Run unit, serves as the principal investigator of the award. Co-principal investigators are Dennis Risen, ITS project manager, and Lev Gonick, former vice president of ITS and CWRU chief information officer, and currently the chief executive officer of OneCommunity. Phoebe Stewart of the Department of Pharmacology, Mark Griswold of the Department of Radiology, Dan Akerib, formerly of the Department of Physics, and Thomas Shutt, formerly of the Department of Physics, serve as co-investigators for the award. Dan Matthews, ITS manager of network engineering and security, and Kevin Chan, ITS engineer, performed the technical elements of the upgrade.