Keep the Internet Alive!
November 16, 2009 - by DennisPosted under: General
For just about everyone, an Internet connection is an essential utility, like water running from the tap or electricity when we plug into the wall. Since we have been talking with one of our upstream Internet providers recently about a service improvement, we thought it might be interesting to share some of what we do to make sure the University maintains a connection to the Internet 24X7X365.25.
Problems (you know what we mean) will always happen, so we have two fiber-optic connections from separate providers that enter the campus at two different locations, from different directions. These connections are run to separate buildings, and each has a router and firewall. Should there for any reason be a problem with one connection, we automatically drop that one and run exclusively on the other. This has happened a couple of times in the past year, with no impact on our user community.
When we plan these things, we try to learn from other people's mistakes. When the Minneapolis bridge collapsed over the Mississippi, some large companies and universities lost their Internet connection, even though they had two providers. The problem: Both providers depended on cable running across that one bridge!
We have made certain that our service providers have diverse paths to the Internet backbone. They neither cross the East River in the same tunnel, nor traverse Long Island sound in the same path. Between them, there is a connection to the Internet backbone at two points in NYC, one in White Plains and one in Boston. In short, we spend a great deal of time and energy making sure that all of the AU community can get their research done, connect with friends, keep our websites available, and get to those kitty videos on YouTube :-)
Turns out, we will be here over the Thanksgiving break, working with that provider we mentioned to push even more resiliency into our Internet connection! Enjoy the Holiday.
Christine Reslmaier has been working as the Web content editor for the Adelphi site since July 2007. She received a B.A. in psychology from Binghamton University quite a while ago and is now enrolled in the Community Health master's program at AU's School of Ed.
