November 2004
ORION installs key backup circuits - more in the works...
ORION’s network engineers are feeling a bit more comfortable this week, after Hydro One Telecom - one of ORION's strategic partners, provisioned a 760-kilometre critical GigE backup circuit between Windsor and Ottawa, the second such critical backup circuit to be deployed this year.
The 150M TLS circuit provides backup should ORION services be disrupted, between Windsor and Toronto, in case of an outage on the primary path.
"Hydro One Telecom went the extra mile for us on this critical backup circuit, by customizing the circuit to make it more useful for the network," said ORION Senior Director of Engineering and Operations, Sam Mokbel.
An earlier backup circuit was provisioned by CANARIE in June of this year, covering the 400 kilometres between Ottawa and Toronto.
These are part of an ongoing effort to create additional backup protection and bandwidth swapping arrangements with partners, including RISQ in Quebec, and Merit and NYSERNet, the R&E networks in Michigan and New York.
Among ORION’s important constituents are the CIOs and heads of the technology departments of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions, with whom the network has collaborated very closely from the start of the ORION project, to ensure a smooth completion of the network and to provide ongoing feedback and support.
Backup services and network reliability are clearly a major priority for the CIOs and IT Directors.
In a briefing to the Ontario universities’ Association of Computing Services Directors (ACSD) on November 10, ORION President/CEO Phil Baker reported that ORION is now working with partners to establish additional critical backup circuits, in addition to the two new circuits now in place.
ORION currently also has high-speed peering connections with CANARIE and Quebec’s RISQ network in Ottawa, and two low-speed (DS3) SONET backup circuits from Toronto to Thunder Bay, and from Toronto to North Bay.
The network is looking to establish additional high-speed GigE backup links on other corridors such as those to North Bay and St. Catharines.
It is also expecting to establish high-speed peering connections with Merit in Michigan, with fibre through the Windsor-Detroit tunnel in the next few months. ORION will also peer with NYSERNet in New York at Buffalo; perhaps as early as this spring.
These arrangements are critical to ORION, which hopes to work with its partners to start creating a redundant ring around the Great Lakes, by negotiating high-speed capacity swapping with MERIT, and, through ORION’s connection with RISQ in Quebec, down through New York State, with NYSERnet.
View maps of ORION’s backup architecture at www.orion.on.ca/news/pdf/ORIONBackup.pdf
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