INDUSTRY

Internet2 today announced that it will collaborate with HP, an Internet2 corporate sponsor, to deploy HP ProLiant DL360 G4 servers to support Internet2's national Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) testbed, which will serve as a model for tomorrow's high performance network architectures. As a critical component of the HOPI testbed, the HP servers will provide monitoring and control plane capabilities equipping researchers with the necessary tools to measure testbed performance as well as experiment with dynamic provisioning capabilities. "HP has a long history of providing technical leadership within the Internet2 community," said Rick Summerhill, Internet2's director of network research, architecture and technologies and HOPI Design Team co-chairperson. "Their latest participation in the HOPI effort will allow scientists from around the world to better understand the performance of hybrid networks under a variety of conditions as well as enable wide-scale experimentation with new networking technologies." Since the HOPI facility is experimental in nature, it is critical to understand how the testbed performs as it undergoes various network tests. Once deployed, the HP servers will be used to monitor and measure the performance of the HOPI circuits by collecting error reporting data as well as network performance measurement data allowing for event correlation and performance results of varying network experiments. Summerhill added, "By providing measurement and monitoring capabilities, HP's servers enable us to understand the impact of network experiments on a national-scale basis. We can then translate this knowledge into the production network environment to ensure a stable next-generation architecture." In addition, the servers will create a platform for control plane activities which enable engineers to experiment with dynamic provisioning capabilities, a key component of the HOPI testbed. By controlling the topology of the network, the servers will work to instruct the various pieces of equipment in the network on which connections to build, when, and for how long. The control plane servers will take the user entered request for greater network capacity, confirm the availability of those resources, communicate the instructions necessary for configuring the network to the various network devices and then remove that configuration after the usage is complete. In the future, as bandwidth-intensive applications become more prevalent, this type of on-demand provisioning will enable users to quickly bring up a dedicated optical circuit to send large data transfers without disrupting traffic on the backbone network. "HP is driving the evolution of information technology to accommodate an increasingly digital world, where business processes are global and services can be rapidly created, delivered and retired," said John Sontag, department manager, Planetary Scale Computing Program, HP Labs. "The collaboration with Internet2 will enable better understanding of next-generation networking principles and architectures and the design of future networks that are best suited for this dynamic, 24x7 environment." Over the next six months, the HP servers will be deployed into the HOPI nodes located in Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and in Washington D.C. The nationwide HOPI testbed will serve as a foundation for cutting-edge network experimentation and a model for the next-generation of Internet2's existing high performance packet-based Abilene network. The HOPI testbed will utilize facilities from the Abilene Network, the National LambdaRail (NLR) network, the MAN LAN exchange point, and several regional optical networks.