CCC Network Tour

This NET125 lab was actually a tour of the network at CCC. We traced the path data takes as it leaves our computer and enters the Internet. Ken Martin, Director Information Technology, was our tour guide.

We started on the third floor of the Wayne West Building in Room 326. Network access is provided there by RJ-45 jacks mounted in the floor. Cat5 cable is connected to the jacks. From there the Cat5 cable is routed to a utility room on the west wing of the 3^rd floor. There is another utility room on the east wing of the 3^rd floor that handled the computer labs on that end.

In the utility room there were two banks of switches. The CAT5 and CAT6 cables from all the rooms on the west wing are routed to this room through the drop ceiling in 3-4 inch conduit. The cables are run to patch panels. The two main cables used on campus are copper (CAT5 and CAT6) and fiber optic. From the patch panel a standard network cable runs to the switches. We noticed that most of the cable bundles were labeled with the room number . Mapping is key to setting up a large network to help with troubleshooting. Fluke makes products that help to find out what goes where.

The bank of access switches contained four Cisco switches 3548's and 3750's all were 10/100. The access switches were smart switches and from there they are VLANed off. Each room was physically connected to the switch but they were logically VLANed off into their own separate pool. This is to cut down on the amount of traffic and noise. Instead of one switch handing all the traffic from the entire floor it is broken down into manageable sections.

From the switch panel there were a couple of fiber ports used for fiber optic cables. The cable used was multimode fiber. This cable went down and connected to second floor and then the second floor connected to the first floor. Fiber optic cable is used because it is faster, noise resistant, and has longer runs. From the first floor the fiber cable runs to the LRC Center to Ken's office.

Also for each bank of switches there were UPS (uninterruptible power supply)units to provide backup power in case of an outage. This not only helps to protect data and keep the network running, it also provides power to keep the phone system operational.

In addition to the cables for the wired network, this room also houses the cables for the wireless network on campus for the Wayne West Building and the cables for the IP cameras. PoE is used to power the cameras and the phones. To run power to the camera and phones the switch has to be PoE capable.

From the access layer switches the information goes to the distribution layer switch which then runs to the second floor. The three types of access switches that are currently used on campus are 3548, 3524, and 3524 PoE. The fiber optic cable on campus is run in a ring to connect every building. The fiber optic cable run also includes; CMAST, Civic Center, Institute of Marine Science, BLET, MARTEC, and the buildings of campus. There is also another ring running in the opposite direction in redundancy.

In the LRC building is the nerve center for the network on campus. All connections are routed to main hub. The setup is similar to the utility room in Wayne West. Instead of CAT5 or 6 cables running in, all the FO cables are coming in and are run to a fiber optic patch panel. From the patch panel the cables are run to the core. There are two UPS systems set up in redundancy plus a generator to make sure the system retains power in case or outages. The network speed at CCC is a gigabit which is what most universities have. This is because of our relationship with NC State, UNC IMS, Duke Marine Lab, and NOAA. We have fiber optic connections to Greenville, Wilmington, We are a point of presence for NCREN North Carolina Research and Education Network.

The servers for Blackboard, VoIP, and email are also located in the same room. Virtualized servers are run from this room too. Instead of buying a new server, with a quad core processor and 16 gigs of RAM we can run 16 virtual servers on the one machine.

The tape backup system is an LTL3 does 400gigs uncompressed and 800 gigs compressed and it holds 8 tapes which gives us 3.2 terabytes and is very fast.

There are several virtualization projects in the planning stages, desktop virtualization, Blackboard virtualization. VMware is being used for server virtualization and Xen for desktop virtualization. The goal is to have most virtualization projects in place in the next few years.