Minutes of Working Group Meeting

IfA Hilo Facility, Hilo

March 8, 2012

Present:

Absent:

Minutes

  1. Current Network Status

    2. On December 20 -- From 9:00am to Noon -- Due to maintenance work on the INET fiber, the Interisland fiber, and equipment at Mauna Lani on the Big Island, all Hilo and Waimea traffic was rerouted over the microwave. UH West Hawaii was shut down completely while the work was ongoing.

    On January 29 and 30 -- Due to an air conditioning failure in the carrier room at the MRTC, the router connecting the Interisland fiber was dropping packets. Maui traffic was rerouted over the microwave. Big Island to Oahu traffic over the new direct 10Gb route was not affected.

    On February 15 -- During the 10Gb upgrade in Hilo, UH-ITS inadvertently started a stress test which caused a complete downtime for Hilo for about 20 minutes starting around 12:40pm.

  2. Brief Updates of the UH 10Gb Upgrade Work since the Last Meeting

    3. a. On February 15, UH-ITS successfully brought up a 10Gb circuit between Hilo and the NHERC which completed the 10Gb path between the IfA Hilo building and Oahu. The original plan for February 15 included patching INET into CFHT in Waimea to complete the 10Gb path:

    IfA Hilo - UH Hilo - NHERC - CFHT - Mauna Lani - Keller (Oahu)

    However, UH-ITS found out that Oceanic has brought the INET fiber close to the CFHT building but not patched inside and was, therefore, not able to bring 10Gb in and out of CFHT just yet. UH-ITS was hoping to get this done within the next few weeks.

    Pui Hin provided to each member at the meeting a diagram showing the current connection status.

    b. There is now a direct 10Gb link between the Big Island (Mauna Lani) and Oahu.

    c. The Maui MRTC and Oahu is now connected at 10Gb.

    d. The two 10Gb links to the Mainland are handling a little over 1/2 of the commercial traffic through TransitRail-Commercial Peering Service (TR-CPS) at Seattle and Los Angeles.

    e. It has been decided that the 1GE link currently connecting IfA Hilo and the SX Southern path through CFHT will be kept as our backup for the 10gb link through UH-Hilo and NHERC until we get the 10Gb link to HP and on to Mauna Lani along the Saddle Road.

  3. Plans for 10Gb Support in Hilo

    4. Pui Hin has looked into possible equipment for 10Gb support in Hilo and at HP, and favored the Cisco 4900M. The Cisco 3650E is a little less expensive but the 4900M with more memory to support more routes -- up to 1 million -- is more future proof. The possibility of using HP equipment was also discussed. Cisco equipment is preferred for backbone installation such as the MKOCN switch in the IfA Hilo building and at HP for the following reasons:

    . Ease of support for MKOCN and UH-ITS staff
    . To remain fully compatible with UH-ITS
    . Cisco equipment has historically proven to be robust for us.

    For redundancy, the MKOCN 4900M will connect to both UH-ITS 4900Ms in the IfA Hilo building at 10Gb. Also for equipment redundancy, Pui Hin proposed keeping one of the two 3750s that are currently being used, and connect that to both UH-ITS 4900Ms at 1Gb. Each observatory can choose to connect to either or both switches.

    Observatories that wish to upgrade to 10Gb might consider HP equipment as it is considerably less expensive. For those who want to stay with Cisco, the 3560X with two X2 ports is ~$8k. However, Pui Hin doesn't think there is a big rush for the observatories to upgrade to 10Gb as our cacti graphs show that the current bandwidth demands by individual observatories are very low. Of course even without any upgrade, the obseratories will still be able to benefit from the backbone upgrade in that there will be 10Gb bandwidth available for the aggregate traffic. The 4900M will support 1Gb connections.

  4. Next meeting

    5. June 14th, Thursday, 10:00am at the Subaru Hilo Building.

    Note: This meeting has been rescheduled for June 19th.

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Last updated June 07, 2012 by Miranda Hawarden-Ogata