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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Network Upgrades Over Spring Break


Did you notice that during last week’s Spring Break, Communications and Network Services performed upgrades to our critical network infrastructure without any “down time”  or interruption of services?  This was made possible due to last year’s major network upgrade which provided redundancy and resiliency to our data infrastructure.    Prior to the major upgrades performed last February (2012) each of these systems would have resulted in maintenance windows requiring a service outage. As a result of the new resilient network design, CNS was able to perform upgrades last week to critical systems with no downtime. These upgrades also allowed CNS to test emergency failover functionality of the network, which automatically trigger in the event of a disaster. Below is a list of the critical systems that were upgraded “live” and a brief description of what they do.

Core Network Switches                           [All campus data, Internet, VoIP Phones, E-Mail, M-Drive]

Internet Routers                                       [All external Web browsing, Video Streaming, E-Mail]

Bandwidth Shaping                                 [All external Web browsing, Video Streaming, E-Mail]

Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)         [Internal network security controls]

Wireless                                                    [All MCC wireless connections for mobile devices]

James Clement
ETS:CNS
04/11/2013