As Chapman University continues to grow, the need for reliable high speed access to Internet and research networks becomes even more important.   The demand for internet is growing constantly, whether it is in support of administrative work and research on the part of faculty and staff, or to support the needs of students, sometimes focused more on social media tools or entertainment.  The increasing demand for video (Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc.) has made the university’s consumption of internet access grow tremendously.  In fact over the last several years, Chapman’s growth in internet usage has increased monthly by 2% and annually by 25%.  During the upcoming months and year, we expect that growth to continue to increase.

In order to meet these ever-growing needs while simultaneously holding costs down, on July 1st, 2016, IS&T completed an upgrade of the data connectivity between the main Orange campus and our Rinker Health Sciences campus in Irvine.

Dark Fiber Diagram

The newly upgraded Metro Ethernet network utilizes the leasing of “dark fiber”, which is fiber optic cabling in the street dedicated for Chapman’s use. This creates a redundant data path, similar to a ring, so that Chapman can have full control of the network speeds and more resilient network connection.   The next step is to extend the dark fiber ring to Panther Village.  A high-level diagram is attached.

The University is now buying internet services from three different providers, improving our reliability and redundancy, and also allowing us to negotiate better costs.  In addition, the multiple vendor scenario allows us to route “commodity” internet via commercial providers at the lowest possible cost, allowing us to reserve our Internet2 service for educational and research purposes only.

This project has provided the University the following benefits:

  • Immediately triple the bandwidth to the Rinker Health Science campus, from the current 300 MB to 1GB, with ability to increase speeds up to 10gb in the near future.
  • Increase in total Internet bandwidth available to the University from 2.5Gb to 21 Gb with a reduction in total costs.
  • Increased service reliability, with the University now being able to sustain connectivity in the event of a cable cut or other unpredictable event between the campuses and our Internet providers.

The new upgraded network is expected to accommodate even higher speeds in the future (40Gb and 100Gb) as technology and the University’s needs continue to grow in the coming years.”

This project was recently covered by the Orange County Register, along with a discussion of our recently implemented Numa server.  Read the article here:  http://www.ocregister.com/articles/server-683832-numa-chapman.html