Computer News No. 123  Sep.-Oct. 2006

Campus Network Backbone Upgraded with 10G Technology

The Computer Centre is pleased to announce that the campus network backbone has been upgraded to deploy 10Gbps technology.  The old campus network backbone was based on Cisco Catalyst 6509 backbone gigabit switches which has been running for over 6 years.  There has always been expansion of the campus network each year and more network equipments are connecting to the backbone switches.

Although the current backbone equipment has gone through different upgrades over the years to cope with the increased network requirement, they are now running close to its end of life and future upgrades will likely incur a higher upgrade and maintenance costs.  Starting from last year, the Computer Centre is gradually building up a new campus backbone based on Huawei-3Com's high performance 10G Ethernet backbone equipment, the Quidway S8512 10Gigabit Ethernet switches.

The new campus backbone consists of three such 10G Ethernet switches interconnected together to form a resilient ring topology. (See Figure 1) This new network backbone has two gigabit links to the old Cisco campus network backbone to maintain the network connectivity and compatibility with the existing network services.

Figure 1: Ring Topology of the new 10G Ethernet campus network backbone switches

A new campus network topology is being built up on the new backbone.  Some of the network services are also being migrated to this new backbone.  This new backbone provides higher network bandwidth to cope with increased bandwidth requirements from users and applications. The new backbone will also facilitate the use of more demanding network applications, such as high definition video broadcast, since the 10G Ethernet switches support newer hardware features for implementing the advanced network functions such as IP multicast and IPv6.