The Networking Group is responsible for elements of and executing that portion of ECS’ strategic plan that deals with the College of Engineering’s communications and computing infrastructure. This Group was first formed in the mid 1980s with the mission of overseeing the installation of network wiring and infrastructure hardware in approximately thirteen Engineering building distributed within the core of Penn State’s University Park, PA campus. Today, with a staff of two exceptionally qualified and proficient individuals, ECS now supports networking operations in twenty-seven buildings.
In the early years, the infrastructure consisted of a central 10mbps connected core that serviced the aforementioned thirteen buildings over a “flat Ethernet” architecture and operating environment. Growing bandwidth demands coupled with assuming responsibility for supporting more buildings in the early 1990s led to an over-stressed operational environment. By the mid 1990s, ECS migrated the College to a single-core 100mbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) centric architecture; this robust and reliable architecture remained in service until the University’s central IT operations announced it was abandoning support of this technology; Circa, 2000.
By the turn of the century, ECS migrated the College’s network back to an Ethernet-centric environment in which then approximately twenty-three buildings were individually connected at 100mbps to the central Penn State backbone. It was also about this time, as we’ll all recall, that the Internet environment became somewhat more hostile and operational threats to safe business computing jeopardized data security. The changing threat environment resulted in the College’s implementation of firewalls in all buildings; Circa, 2003.
In 2004, ECS embarked on an initiative to offer secure wireless networking to College faculty, staff and students; within a year’s time, all thirteen academic departmental buildings, the Dean’s Office complex, and a few ancillary support facilities had homogeneous wireless computing connectivity. Personnel then worked with the University’s central IT staff to extend tunneled wireless services to anyone in the Penn State community while they were within access point connectivity ranges.
By mid 2006 and through today, the winds of change began to blow. Changes in central backbone connectivity offerings, increases in bandwidth required to support the College’s academic mission, aging equipment and the exponentially increasing threat environment indicated a need to investigate changes in networking strategies and architectures. Today, each of the now twenty-seven supported building have or are migrating to gigabit connectivity through one of two high performance cores consisting of state-of-the-art Juniper firewalls and Alcatel-Lucent routers capable of providing up to 40 Gbps throughput; in addition, other measure are implemented to protect both the network and computing environments.
Globalization of the Internet provides greater access to data and information through distributed network consortiums in the United States, South America, European community and third world nations. Easy access to networking services through mobile computing and cellular networks, while service the public good, offers less that reputable individuals with new technologies for information espionage. Institutional networks routinely observe hacker compromise attacks that approach over 400 attempts/sec. These attacks focus on gaining access to personal data stored on organizational servers and user systems. It’s not a far stretch to assume that institutional intellectual property, corporate financial information, product designs, and strategic directions will all be targets of hackers.
Today, the future directions in networking for the immediate and next five years are clear: institutions must maximize their efforts to minimize unauthorized access to personnel and institutional data. As technologies mature, enterprises will necessarily need to incorporate advanced Network Access Control (NAC), Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/ISP), Remote Access Control (RAC), and secure wireless systems. ECS’ proactive infrastructure plan developed in 2006 encompasses the use of these technologies to ensure faculty, staff, and students have the advanced technologies needed to perform their academic and academic support missions without concern for the security of critical information.
James CarrasNetwork Coordinator |
Office: 152B Hammond Building Phone: 814-863-4425 Click here to email |
Thomas LongSenior Systems Analyst |
Office: 151C Hammond Building Phone: 814-863-6104 Click here to email |
Main Office |
Phone: 814-865-1444 Fax: 814-863-7582 |
Formerly Electronic and Computer Services