French version here.
Since the merging project of the 3 historical public universities of Lille, the IT teams have studied the construction of a high speed network for the University of Lille. Using the available budget, this operation has permitted the interconnection of 6 sites with black fiber long term rental. As this rental is of type IRU (Irreversible Right of Use), we can do whatever we want with them during the rental.
A 40 km optical loop has been linking the Cité Scientifique, Pont de Bois, Médecine, Droit-Moulins, Pharmacie and Siège sites since the end of 2017. New core network active equipments have been installed to use new technologies adapted to wide area networks (WANs) such as large metropolitan networks. The network service of the DSI (IT department) of the university has handled all the engineering, from the launch in December 2017 to the exploitation and supervision of this new network.
Pros
- Very interesting return on investments of the 15 year black fiber rental.
- Full in-house administration.
- High speed 10 Gb/s that can evolve towards higher throughput if necessary.
- Ring topology that provides security, and increased availability.
- High level protocols that enable µs recovery in case of a down link and the possibility to transport different client traffic in isolation as an operator network.
Cons
- IRU rental necessitate to pay up front for 15 years.
Evolution
- Depending on budget, connect other sites of the university to allow them to use the cloud services comfortably.
- This network opens possibilities for research institutions in Lille to use the high performance facilities of the university. Several of these institutions will join this network in the following months (Institut Pasteur de Lille, Institut de Biologie de Lille, MESHS).
Contact: Dominique Marant, Head of the Service Réseau et Téléphonie, DSI Université de Lille.