IT Services engineers and technicians will be performing two major upgrades to the Anchorage campus telephone system and data network this week. Outage times are available here. 
Two major upgrades to UAA’s telephone system and data network have taken place over the past three weeks. “Both upgrades have been in the planning and design process for much of the past six months”, said Rich Whitney Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology. “Together, they amount to over $500,000 in investment by UAA in critical technology infrastructure”, said Whitney.
Anchorage Meridian Telephone Switch Upgrade
The first upgrade involves UAA’s telephone system. The Anchorage main campus and various metropolitan locations operate with our own local telephone service not unlike commercial carriers like ACS and GCI. UAA provides the university community with local telephone service, voicemail and long distance service through this system.
The UAA Nortel Meridian™ Option 81-C telephone system has experienced huge increases in demand over the past two years with the growth of existing programs and the construction and renovation of facilities. Additionally, our voicemail system has reached it’s end-of-life and new technology is now available.
In early February planning began on replacing major portions of the telephone system, including CPU’s, Fiber Network Fabric (FNF) and a new network group providing increased telephone capacity. A new voicemail system called CallPilot™ was identified to replace the existing voicemail system. Installation of system components has been phased-in over two planned outages during the past month and a forthcoming planned outage early in September. A final installation of the new CallPilot system will be scheduled for mid-semester.
This installation schedule has been required to ensure that necessary equipment is available to meet the demand for increased call handling capabilities associated with faculty and students returning for fall semester. The system will add 1,000 new lines and capacity to handle new remote telephone switches. Customers should not notice any real changes associated with the system upgrade. It basically will allow UAA growth capacity for an anticipated 3-4 year period. Cost of the system upgrade was $264,000.
Implementation of Nortel’s CallPilot system will be noticeable by customers when completed in mid-semester. The familiar “Voicemail Lady” voice will change. Other than this the system capabilities will remain much the same. One new feature that will be evaluated for potential roll-out to customers is unified messaging. Briefly, this is the ability to listen to voicemail messages through electronic mail thereby allowing customers to review all voice/text messages through a single means.
UAA’s Core Network Replacement
Replacement of UAA’s core network has been the topic of several capital proposals over the past three years. Capital requests have not been funded during this period and the core network has become more obsolete and unable to support increasing demands for high-speed TCP/IP based applications such as streaming media and video-conferencing.
In January of this year Cisco announced end-of-life for several of the existing core network’s key technologies. This resulted in a decision to internally re-allocate $150,000 of university funds and invest $100,000 in student technology funds to build the new Gigabit switching and routing core network.
The core network replacement project has been a tremendously complex project involving IT network and system engineers and technicians. The project has disassembled the aging ATM/Lane campus switching environment and Cisco™ 7200 routers. A new Gigabit (1,000 Mb/s) switching ring comprised of three fiber-optic connected Cisco™ 6500 switches located in the CAS machine room, Commons and College of Business facilities represents the new core network. Once in place, this new equipment is connected to distribution switches located around the periphery of the ring which provide Gigabit services to campus users.
Besides the sheer complexity of installing and connecting the equipment to the campus network environment, the replacement project sought to make the transition invisible to campus customers. To the greatest extent possible, installation, cut-over and migration of the existing network has taken place during planned outages on Sundays.
An unusual mid-week planned outage took place this past Wednesday due to late delivery of equipment and the impending start of school next Monday. This outage was intended to install the equipment into final resting places and swing fiber-optic services from the old core network technology to the new switches. Some difficulties were encountered with fiber-optic cables, amplifiers and switch configurations which created widespread network service outages on Thursday. IT engineers, technicians and staff worked from 8pm Wednesday night through 4am Friday to install and subsequently restore full network service to the Anchorage metropolitan campus locations.
The new Gigabit switching ring has already demonstrated both its superiority and ability to support UAA’s “need for speed”. Prior to Wednesday, core network CPU utilization based on daily network traffic ranged from 40-60%. On Friday, CPU utilization on the new core network for comparable traffic levels remained less than 3%. Tests of local multipoint video-conference sessions produced extremely high-quality video and audio. Ability to move large data files across the network also increased in speed by factors of 120:1.
Over the next two months, IT Services engineers will implement Quality of Service, or QOS, technology on the new core network which will allow UAA to structure how network bandwidth and applications are supported. QOS will permit IT Services to provide much better service and add new network services and features in coming months such as improved security management and network monitoring and management.
