Brocade 100 Gigabit Ethernet Solution Advances Indiana University Technology Leadership  and Ability to Attract Students

Brocade has established itself as one of the top two providers of carrier-grade 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) routing solutions for major research and education institutions, service providers and enterprises worldwide. Keeping in line with Indiana University’s (IU) goal to lead in technology innovation and performance, Indiana is the first state to launch a 100 GbE network dedicated to research and education.

The new network, named Monon100, is up to 10 times faster than the current networks. It enables Indiana University scientists, medical researchers and students to rapidly share and expedite the processing of the massive amounts of data created by modern digital instruments, such as revolutionary DNA sequencers, advanced electron microscopes and large-particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. Monon100 is named after the Monon Railroad which connected Indiana’s higher education institutions in major metropolitan areas to Chicago. In a similar way, Monon100 will provide wide-open connectivity between institutions of higher education in Indiana, increasing capabilities for researchers and providing new opportunities for collaboration, which could in turn lead to new discoveries in science and medicine.

The clear need for faster connectivity has forced advanced education and research institutes to methodically plan for both immediate and future capacity requirements. This network traffic surge affects everything from the IU research and education networks to the global public Internet where bandwidth is doubling every 18 to 24 months. Since the Monon100 network is designed to transport petabytes of complex data, it is critical in reducing the time to achieve the results necessary for educational and scientific progress. Similar to other organizations with high volumes of variable traffic flows and sustained bandwidth growth requirements, IU needed a highly reliable yet cost-effective solution with dense 10 and 100 GbE routing capabilities—with the ability to deliver massive scalability for anticipated bandwidth swells in the future.

“A network as fast as Monon100 dramatically improves researchers’ ability to handle very large data sets,” said David Jent, associate vice president of networks for Indiana University. “It’s not uncommon for scientific instruments used to study things like human genes and complex climate change to produce data sets of one petabyte or greater. To move a data set this large on our current network connection takes 10 or 11 days. On Monon100 with Brocade 100 GbE connections it will take just over 24 hours.”

Indiana University and Purdue University Indianapolis will be the first groups of higher education to connect directly to Monon100. The link will be a resource available to all Indiana GigaPoP members, including Purdue, Notre Dame and IU.

Education and research institutes, including High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, must continually evaluate their networking requirements to manage massive volumes of scientific- and medical-related data. Delivering up to four times the 100 GbE wire-speed density and nine times the system capacity of competing routers, Brocade MLXe Series Core Routers help simplify the Monon100 network with significantly less infrastructure and operational overhead. The routers support 32 wire-speed 100 GbE ports, delivering a total switching capacity of 15.36 Terabits in a single chassis.

To help reduce operational expenditures and promote advanced customer expansion, the 2-port 100 GbE blades cost just a fraction of competitive offerings and offer the widest range of supported CFP optics. When installed in the Brocade MLXe routers, these blades enable customers to deploy the industry’s first Terabit-per-second trunk, which utilizes multiple ports in a single logical link for greater bandwidth and reduced management up to capacities of 1.6 Terabits.