Network Upgrade 2020 Why a New Network

Background

The February 2019 network meltdown underscored as never before the need for the college to upgrade it's dated networking infrastructure. Individually, the problems that precipitated the meltdown were not terribly serious; their confluence, however, underscored the need not only for new networking equipment, but for a new network design.

In the spring of 2019 the Board of Trustees authorized expenditures to completely revamp the network. During the design phase the decision was made to implement a so-called Layer 3 network to replace the older Layer 2 network. Based upon proven design concepts, the new network will be more reliable, scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant than its predecessor, and will be easier to manage and troubleshoot. 

Preliminary Steps

Over the summer and early fall new networking equipment was put in place throughout the campus and connected to the new networking core. In late summer, Amherst_Secure WiFi was retired, and eduroam became the default WiFi SSID for the campus community. In October Seeley Mudd became the first building where the wired (Ethernet) infrastructure was switched from the old network to the new.

Meanwhile, the old network would occasionally exhibit some of the symptoms seen during the February outage. Based upon the experience gleaned from the Seeley Mudd pilot as well as fears about how long IT could keep the old network running, late in the year the decision was made to accelerate the migration to the new network by switching the entire campus to the new WiFi network early in 2020 and to cutover as many buildings as possible to the new wired network during Interterm 2020.

WiFi Migrates En Masse

As part of the accelerated migration plan the entire WiFi infrastructure was switched to the new network on Friday, January 3rd. The Amherst SSID was retired, and a new AmherstGuest SSID put in place both for visitors to campus and as a connection point for devices such as X-Boxes and Rokus that can't connect to eduroam.

Ethernet Migrates a Building at a Time

On the Ethernet side, most campus buildings are scheduled to be cutover to the new network during Interterm. However, some of the larger buildings--especially those that using optical networking--will be cutover at a later date. 

The migration to the new network will entail some interruption of services. However, the result will be a modern, stable networking platform that will serve the college for many years.