NETWORKS

Force10 Networks today announced that two of China's leading universities have deployed the E-Series to build highly resilient and predictable 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus networks. Leveraging the resiliency and scalability of the Force10 E-Series, Tsinghua and Shenzhen universities are building advanced networking environments that can deliver new services and applications to students and researchers. "As one of the top engineering schools in the world, building a robust and scalable campus network with a new generation of technology is a strategic decision that will enable us to offer new services, such as remote multimedia education and grid computing to our students," said professor XueNong Li, director of the Tsinghua University Network Research Center. "In our heterogeneous campus network, Force10's E-Series has proven to be the most stable and scalable platform in the network, even sustaining line-rate performance during periodic traffic spikes caused by network virus attacks." Beijing-based Tsinghua University, China's leading engineering university, is building a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus network to provide more than 60,000 students and researchers with high-speed Internet and intranet access, the bandwidth to collaborate on data-intensive computing projects and a variety of other advanced networking services. Tsinghua's new 10 Gigabit Ethernet network will connect with the university's existing campus network and to CERNET, the Chinese Education and Research Network. Tsinghua University's existing network is approaching capacity as the student population continues to rapidly increase, impacting network performance and reliability. The Force10 E-Series enables Tsinghua University to aggregate thousands of student and research connections in a single system while technical innovations in system design provide a new level of security against network attacks. With separate data and control planes, virus attacks are isolated and contained, preventing unwanted traffic from impacting performance. Shenzhen University City, an educational complex that includes subsidiary campuses for Tsinghua University, Beijing University and the Harbin Institute of Technology, has also deployed the Force10 E-Series as the foundation of its next-generation network. The Force10 E-Series creates an advanced networking infrastructure across the three campuses and provides connectivity and shared resource applications to students, researchers and faculty throughout Shenzhen University City. With Shenzhen University City expanding to include 10 universities and colleges in the near future, it is essential that its network be both highly resilient and predictable. The Force10 E-Series provides Shenzhen University City with a new level of network and system resiliency, simplifying the network and reducing operational costs, while line-rate Gigabit and 10 Gigabit throughput, regardless of traffic conditions, enable Shenzhen University to provide greater bandwidth and new services throughout the city. By increasing resiliency and simplifying the network, the Force10 E-Series brings predictable performance to Shenzhen University's network. "The Tsinghua University and Shenzhen University City networks support thousands of students and researchers that expect the same superior resiliency and performance levels of a carrier network," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. "The Force10 E-Series will allow the universities to roll out resilient, high performance networks that will scale along with the fast-growing campuses." The Force10 E-Series delivers unmatched scalability while fully distributed hardware and modular software guarantee line-rate Gigabit and 10 Gigabit throughput across all ports regardless of traffic conditions, providing large campus networks with a new level of predictability. With separate data and control planes, network operators can prevent denial of service attacks from disabling the networking infrastructure, ensuring a higher level of network security. Tsinghua and Shenzhen universities are both located in China's Guangdong province. Shenzhen city, China's first special economic zone, and one of its most economically advanced cities, is separated from Hong Kong by a river in the south. Over the last few years, Shenzhen has become China's major export production base.