March 20, 2000

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Operations Center Keeps Abilene Network Humming

By Dawn Bushaus

teve Wallace is used to getting paged at 4 a.m. As manager of the network operations center that oversees Internet 2's Abilene network and some of the exchange points that link Abilene to other high-speed networks worldwide, Wallace often has to rouse himself from a sound sleep to log on and resolve users' networking problems.

"A lot of connectivity to Abilene is international, so problems occur overnight," he says. "All our engineers have network connections to their homes, and they all have laptops."

Wallace manages a staff of 18 people who work in the Abilene network operations center at the University of Indiana, where Wallace is also chief network architect for the telecommunications division. Twelve people on his staff act as a first line of defense for Abilene. Typically working in pairs, technicians take shifts around the clock watching the Abilene network and some of its interconnection points such as the Ameritech Advanced Data Services exchange point in Chicago, which links Abilene to the vBNS backbone run by MCI WorldCom. If the technicians can't resolve a problem, there are six network engineers ready to take over.

So far, network performance on Abilene has been outstanding. During the fourth quarter last year, the access and backbone portions of Abilene were available 99.95% of the time, Wallace says. But the staff knows the network hasn't really been challenged yet.

Services on Abilene began in June, but to date the network hasn't been carrying much traffic. In fact, only about 5% of the network's capacity is used. Typical applications today include E-mail and Web requests, neither of which is bandwidth-intensive. As more users start to run advanced applications such as collaborative videoconferencing, data mining, and high-definition television, maintaining network availability will become more difficult.

The network operations center staff's standards will continue to be high as network usage grows, Wallace says. "If one one-thousandth of one percent of packets on a given link has errors, we consider that a fault. We'll watch for errors, and as they occur we'll start to mark the links black on our weather map." Abilene users can see network conditions at www.abilene.iu.edu.

When a fault occurs, the staff immediately starts working to determine why packets are being dropped or garbled. That typically means first contacting Abilene's developer, Qwest Communications International Inc., to find out whether the Sonet facilities that carry the traffic are working properly. If those facilities check out, then the staff turns to the routers and patch cables connected to the Sonet links.

"It's a standard troubleshooting process," Wallace says. "If it turns out to be a Sonet-layer problem, Qwest has to fix it; if it were a capacity issue, that would be a new and interesting thing for us to work on. I'm sure eventually we'll have that chance."

Return to main story, "Internet 2 Still Searches For Its Niche."

Illustration by Brad Holland

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