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09/01/2005

New Network Project aims to improve IT for the future of Rice

This article and others can be found on the Rice News site.

By Roberta Kelley Henderson

Computers on the Rice campus are brimming over with gigabytes of data, millions of images, music of every genre, papers, theses, spreadsheets, great American novels and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages. Over the past 10 years, the Rice University networking infrastructure has been improved here and there, as needed, to meet the increasingly data-driven requirements of students, faculty and staff.

Still, the role of information technology at Rice has steadily outpaced the growth of the existing network. As existing network equipment breaks down and system weaknesses are patched, new demands are being made on the network, including increasingly collaborative research, data-driven business applications and innovative teaching and learning initiatives rooted in computing services.

Earlier this year, the Division of Information Technology (IT) at Rice began designing a new network infrastructure to overhaul the existing 10-year-old system and install a more adaptable solution to support research, teaching, learning and administration with free-flowing data and limited bottlenecks. The project began this summer with the replacement of wiring, switches and routers to put into place a gigabit network that will be 10 times faster than what is currently in place.

The New Network Project is an 18-monthlong undertaking to update the entire campus network infrastructure - wiring, network electronics and wireless capability - in every campus building, as well as enterprise storage and backups for home directories, files containing thousands of folders. Wireless site surveys are under way and data closet renovations will continue over the next 12 months.

Rice's computing applications, data integrity and daily business activities are fully dependent on a network that provides high availability, consistency and performance on a daily basis. Kamran Khan, vice provost for IT, envisions improvements in information technology services at Rice resulting in an "e-utility" - connectivity, storage, security, backups and mobility that is seamless like electricity or phone service.

"When you flip the switch, you expect the lights to come on, right? And you expect to hear a dial tone when you pick up the phone handset," Khan said. "Rice users should expect and receive the same seamless connectivity with their computers and wireless devices anytime and anywhere on campus upon completion of the network upgrade."

The design and architecture of the new network is designed to be future-ready and modular. "What we're building here is an expressway to the information highway that will help Rice keep pace with the continued accelerated use of future technologies," Khan said. Technologies for the future characteristically require increased performance, higher security, higher speed, greater stability and greater bandwidth to local, state, national and international networks.

As a research university, Rice has a technology infrastructure that is expected to respond not only to increasingly competitive global and environmental factors, but to the needs of the students, faculty and staff as well. Once the New Network Project is complete, Khan said, the entire Rice campus will be wireless, security will have been greatly enhanced and the improved collaborative capacity should have an immediate effect on several projects, including grid computing, bioengineering research, emerging digital libraries, the Connexions Project, the current Terascale and new cluster, collaborations with the Texas Medical Center, art history visual repositories and the Shepherd School of Music's live video conferencing events.

– Roberta Kelley Henderson is the assistant to the vice president for public affairs

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