Education & Distance Learning Enthusiasts- Staying a step ahead

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Staying a step ahead

Communications News - September 1, 1998

Final exam question: What do you do if it's your job to maintain a network that supports 18,000 students dispersed over three campuses with distance learning applications, T1 Internet connections, plus a potential move to packetized video to support video-conferencing for the deans?

Answer: If you're Michael Kindle, network analyst at Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU) in Springfield, Mo., you implement a troubleshooting, maintenance, and evaluation system.

SMSU wanted to provide students with the tools they needed for effective higher education - including student e-mail, shared applications for class curriculums, and connectivity to a new on-line library extension. The university implemented a high-speed network but still had to be proactive in monitoring network activity to keep ahead of innovative students using high-bandwidth applications and expensive Internet connections.

With only two network managers and two student assistants to manage the system, Kindle needed diagnostic equipment that worked quickly and effectively and could be deployed remotely but be managed from one location.

He chose the Shomiti Systems (San Jose, Calif.) Surveyor Product Suite monitoring and analysis tools. The Shomiti Surveyor family, including the Explorer portable protocol analyzer plus Century Taps and Surveyor software, allows Kindle to monitor and evaluate network activity, catching situations before they become problems.

The SMSU network connects 48 buildings, 60 subnets, and more than 4,000 network devices. The campus network is split into five major zones, each with a Cisco Catalyst 5000 switch connected with 100 Mbps full-duplex Ethernet to a Cisco 7513 router at the core of the network. Each of the Catalyst's 1012 subnets connects to a 3Com SuperStack II hub that provides shared 10/100 Mbps to clients.

SMSU also uses full-duplex 100 Mbps links for its server farm, consisting of about 50 servers that mainly run Windows NT. For extra redundancy, SMSU connects the server farm to a Cisco 2926 switch and also to the router at the network nucleus.

Two remote SMSU campuses, Mountain Grove and West Plains, also connect to the main campus network for Internet use and campus resources with a 56K line and a T1, respectively. A fourth 'campus' is SMSU's virtual university providing distance learning opportunities.

SMSU uses Shomiti Surveyor plus Remote software, six full-duplex Explorer analyzers (five distributed and one portable), and seven Century 12-Taps. To monitor subnet traffic, a 12-Tap is connected to each Catalyst switch. Since the analyzers can be remotely controlled, SMSU technicians are able to monitor the entire network or all 60 subnets from any PC running Surveyor plus Remote software.

'Before installing the system, we used a competitor's products. The other product could not analyze full-duplex or handle 100 Mbps speeds, which meant we could see only a tiny snapshot of what was happening in the network,' says Kindle.

The new system, he says, 'gives us the tools to effectively monitor newly installed equipment so we can capture intermittent problems, or even chart the effect new applications will have on our network. A good example is our Cisco router. When it was initially installed, it did not pass data properly and no one could figure out what was wrong. Cisco technicians used the Explorer to analyze the connection, allowing them to diagnose certain protocol issues and find a solution.'

When one of the computer labs experienced a significant slowdown, Kindle used the protocol analyzer to monitor the problem segment for a week and was able to determine that it was a server problem, not a network problem.

SMSU is investigating a move to packetized video over the network this year. If implemented, it will be used initially to support videoconferencing by deans and other university officials and later by others at the school.

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