What makes Harvard's net tick

Jay Tumas, overseer of the network at Harvard University.

Click to see: A picture of Jay Tumas

Harvard's data network supports 125,000-plus users, its Border Gateway Complex routes about a half-million IP addresses and the network carts around 150TB to 200TB of data per day. Jay Tumas, who oversees the operations center at the heart of the network, recently gave Executive News Editor Bob Brown a peek behind the scenes.

Give me a thumbnail sketch of Harvard's network.

The Harvard Core Network (HCN) serves an extremely diverse user population in metro Boston and beyond. We have everything from dual Gigabit Ethernet feeds serving the entire Harvard College network with tens of thousands of clients and a Class B chunk of address space, to a channelized T-3 circuit serving remote affiliates in Washington, D.C., or a T-1 serving a remote library repository in central Massachusetts. The [University Information Systems] NOC [network operations center] is the primary maintenance organization for the Northern Crossroads (NoX), New England's Internet2 aggregation point, which serves 1 million-plus users.

With its scope encompassing close to 1,000 buildings, we solicit advice from all connecting members to solidify customer demarcs, network ownership and funding models. The 120-plus connecting members may manage their own LANs and data centers, or they may have outsourced everything from network maintenance to Windows client updates to us. (To see Harvard's bandwidth use and more, go here.)

I sometimes hear people refer to organizations such as Harvard as having networks that are like phone company networks. Given your background at New England Telephone, is Harvard's network really like a phone company's?

Data networks in the '90s were notoriously undocumented, with physical plants that looked more like spaghetti than anything that an institution would want to trust with its critical data. Harvard and other research and medical institutions began to realize that this network that was quickly becoming part of its critical infrastructure was largely an unknown quantity and that this had to change. So it did.

You will now find that many institutions have carefully documented their physical plant with tools from GIS systems linking underground conduits to fiber inventories, to tagging each end of every fiber and copper cable in their production network. These cycles can be expensive, especially when faced with the daunting challenge of documenting and inventorying a large-scale production network such as Harvard's, but they are cycles well spent and which prove invaluable as we all strive to make our networks as physically robust as our routing protocols are logically robust.

Harvard, as of late, has been exhibiting another telco trait - considering the network as part of the university's critical infrastructure.