News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren B. Kallens" <>]

Internet2 Collaborates With HP to Support National Hybrid Optical and Packet
Infrastructure Testbed

Industry-Leading Servers To Provide Key Capabilities for Conducting and
Monitoring Network Experiments 

ANN ARBOR, MI, APRIL 20, 2005 - 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.

About Internet2(R)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government,
Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and
technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of
tomorrow's Internet.  Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia,
industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy.
For more information, visit: www.internet2.edu. 

Media Contact:
Lauren Kallens, Internet2

202.331.5345

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