Network Changes Planned to Reduce Impact of Outages

The IT Services Network Engineering Team will begin a project to reduce the impact of network outages on the campus community. The project, which entails a reconfiguration of network equipment, will not affect how students, faculty and staff connect to campus Internet or access online services.

This project addresses a type of building network outage that can overwhelm the core router and cause the Internet to go down campuswide. The reconfiguration will prevent this type of outage from affecting the core router, limiting building outages to a single distribution switch and reducing the likelihood of outages for users campuswide.

The reconfiguration will also result in a more efficient use of hardware resources. After the project is completed, network routing will be spread across six distribution switches instead of being consolidated at two core routers.

The changes will be implemented over the next few months during regular network maintenance periods, affecting one distribution switch per period. During maintenance on each switch, users may experience 5 to 10 seconds of Internet downtime as the changes are applied.

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