"Not quite dead yet !"

In case you were worried about my untimely demise, no worries, I'm still alive. I've just been so busy doing that I haven't been writing about what I'm doing :) I'll attempt to catch you up and then will try to get a post out at least once a week from now on.

Wireless:

We deployed about 3,000 Access Points over the summer - roughly an average of 200-250 every week. We also rolled out WPA2 Enterprise (aka 802.1x) during the same timeframe. The majority of the Bloomington Residence Halls have wireless coverage with a few more buildings coming up later this month and around the first of the year. We're now turning ou4 attention to 802.11n to prepare for upgrades next summer. As of yesterday we have 802.11n APs in hand to start testing.

The wireless rollout wasn't without it's bumps, but there were very few user impacting problems. We've been getting a lot of positive feedback from users. When users make a point to call the NOC just to let us know how happy they are with the wireless service, you know it must be going well ! We went out on a limb just a bit by choosing a vendor (HP) that was not a household name in the area of large-scale, controller-based enterprise wireless, but it's worked out extremely well.

Core Upgrade and MPLS VPNs

We also completed the vast majority of the core network upgrade over the summer. The last parts of that upgrade are happening this coming week. We'll be replacing the Juniper M10i Border Routers with Cisco 6500's. That greatly increases the capacity on our Border Routers. As a result, we will be upgrading our primary link to the Internet from 2Gbps to 10Gbps at the same time as the swap out which will happen the day after tomorrow. Once this is completed all our core routers will be Cisco 6500's. Since we had this planned, we had been holding off on deploying MPLS so we didn't have to deal with vendor interoperability issues. Not that this wouldn't have worked with both Juniper and Cisco routers, but this saved us quite a bit of testing. We plan to have our first MPLS VPN live and fully test before the Thanksgiving holiday. This will be the VPN for PCI-DSS systems.

PCI-DSS Compliance

This is really coming together although there is still a lot of work to be done to meet the internal deadline of December 31st of this year. We should be ready to start transitioning system into the PCI-DSS MPLS VPN the week following Thanksgiving. The last network requirement we're still struggling with is 2-factor remote-access. This is just a matter of getting our current Safeword token system working with our Cisco VPN servers. It looks like we may have to wait on an upgrade of the Safeword system, but we're trying to find alternatives because that is not likely to happen before 12/31.

New Data Center

This project is really coming together as well. We're hoping to nail down the final network design for the new data center in a meeting this afternoon. I'll have a post devoted just to the data center network design issues. I think the industry is on the cusp of a major shift in data center networking. Top-of-rack switches are clearly the future in the data center, but products are only just now starting to become available. Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a promising technology, but it's day in the sun is probably still 18-24 months out. Also in the 18-24 month time horizon is 40G and 100G ethernet.