Grab bag

A little trivia about myself. When I was much younger,  I taught myself how to juggle for a talent show.  The grand finale was to juggle 3 apples while taking a bite out of one of them each time it came around.  Well, right now I feel a bit like a juggler with a dozen apples in the air, desperately trying not to drop one, so here are some snippets of what I'm up to...

- Openflow.  We have our "production" Openflow network up which includes a switch in the Comm Services building, two in Wrubel and one that supports an Openflow SSID that is deployed in Lindley Hall (Computer Science), Informatics and the Innovation Center.  We need to get more "testers" moved onto the switches and SSID to stress test the system.   My laptop and IP phone have been on the Openflow network for almost 6 weeks without any problems.  We're hoping to have a Informatics grad student working on the project with us starting in September.

- Wireless.  When HP bought 3COM/H3C this spring they got what appears to be a very good controller-based wireless product from H3C.  We received some eval equipment yesterday which we'll be testing.  We're trying to determine the right path moving forward between HP's two different wireless systems.

- GlobalNOC Summer of Networking.  Students have started arriving with the remaining students starting on June 1st.   Our weekly training program will start the following week.  I think we have 8 total students.  Most of them are in the syseng area, but we also have one in the Service Desk and one in my area (Network Architecture), to help with the test lab.

- Test Lab.  Use of the testlab is really picking up.  We have a bunch of new equipment coming in on eval as well as some permanent equipment and a lot of people who want to do testing.  Ed Furia and I have been supporting this in our spare time (with help from an intern this summer), but we really need to get a full-time lab admin hired.

- Training.  At the GlobalNOC retreat last week there was a lot of interest in developing a training program.  We're hoping to develop a curriculum of hands-on network training that could benefit GlobalNOC staff, other UITS staff, interns, and potentially others.

- IU Health Science Network:  This is a design I proposed in 2007 to resolve many of the issues surrounding the IU School of Medicine and the Clarian hospital system.  It's finally gaining momentum and implementation will start very soon.

Well, those are the highlights !

Hotel California

Well, I'm spending another week in a hotel in California (Sunnyvale this time).   Juniper yesterday, HP today, and Cyan Optics tomorrow.  Cyan makes an interesting product in the packet/optical space.  It's potentially a very good match for RONs and Statenets that don't need a lot of wave services (< 8 waves) and want a low-cost Ethernet services platform that is well integrated with the DWDM platform.  Interestingly, Cyan has a connection to IU in that one of the Cyan founders, Mike Hatfield, is an Indiana native who is an alum of the IU Kelley School of Business.