Manchester (10 Questions)

Question 1

Provide the name and contact details of your local (Departmental) and Institutional network support staff.

Departmental
Colin Morey (moreyc@hep.man.ac.uk)
Owen McShane (owen@hep.man.ac.uk)

Institutional
Malcolm Pitcher (malcolm.pitcher@manchester.ac.uk)

Question 2

Provide details of the responsibilities, together with the demarcation of those responsibilities, of your local and Institutional network support staff.

Colin Morey & Owen McShane - Northgrid systems managers, responsible for systems in the cluster, and the local connections thereof.

Malcolm Pitcher - responsible for connection to MCC.

Question 3

What is a Regional Network Operator (RNO), and why does this matter to you?

The RNOs provide JANET services to the connected education and research sectors.

It matters to me because they connect us to the rest of JANET and the Internet

Question 4

What is SuperJANET4? And more importantly what is SuperJANET5?

SuperJANET4 is the successor to the previous JANETs (Joint Academic NETworks, and the initial backbone is 2.5Gb, as opposed to SuperJANET3 which was 155Mb)

SuperJanet5 will initially be based on 10 Gb. The core equipment should be capable of supporting 40 Gb.

Question 5

Draw a simple diagram showing your local (Departmental) network and sufficient of your Institutional network such that you can trace a line from your end-system to the connection from your Institutes network into the RNO infrastructure.

Question 6

On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5, show the capacity of each link in the network and provide a note against each link of its contention ratio.

(Hint! Just how many 100Mbits/s links are being fed into that 1Gbits/s uplink?)

Done, as above.

Question 7

On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5, colour and distinguish the switches and routers and for each device provide a note of its backplane capability.

(Hint! Just how many [frames per second | packets per second] can the backplane shift?)

Done, as above

Question 8

What is the average and peak traffic flow between your local (Departmental) network and the Institutional network?

What is the average and peak traffic flow between your Institutional network and the RNO?

What is the total capacity of your Institutional connection to the RNO?

Currently we run over a 10Gig link across campus with undergoing work to split that away so we, the Tier2, connect directly to the RNO.

What are the upgrade plans for your local (Departmental) network; your Institutional network and the network run by the RNO?

see above.

Question 9

Do you believe in IS Security? Does your Institute believe in IS Security?

Yes:Yes

Do you believe in firewalls? Does your Institute believe in firewalls?

Yes, another layer in the security onion. : Yes, both at host and at network level.

On the diagram produced in answer to Question 5 colour in the firewall(s) (or other security devices).

Firewalling/Access Control currently takes place somewhere at the NNW uplink end of the 10Gig, and on T2-HEP-S1

Provide information of how changes are made to the rule set of the firewall.

Currently an email to the right people, when the network upgrade happens, we'll have direct control.

Provide a note of the capacity of this device and what happens when that capacity is exceeded.

unknown, unknown.

Question 10

What is the best performance you can achieve from your end-system to an equivalent system located in some geographically remote (and friendly!) Institute?

Depending on connectivity between ourselves and the end point, we could conceviable generate just under 200Meg/s of traffic from 1 system to another. We have no systems with more than 2x1Gig connections in at the moment. This is a theoretical limit, and would be very difficult to acieve in practice due to contention via NNW.

For your end-system:

Do you understand the kernel, the bus structure; the NIC; and the disk system?

Yes. generally.

Do you understand TCP tuning and what it can do for you?

No, it's a black art.

Do you understand your application and what it can do to your performance?

We run many applications and each one has different demands on the network infrastructure.