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November 2007
ORION Tech Workshop
ORION traffic grows over 600%
More institutions collaborating over the network
Use of the ORION network by Ontario's research and education community is expanding exponentially, growing by over 600 per cent over the last two years, reported Sam Mokbel, Senior Director of Engineering and Network Operations, at ORION's Nov. 13 Technical Workshop in Toronto.
Nearly 50 IT directors, network managers and IT staff attended the day-long workshop hosted by Ryerson University, with another 50 attendees tuning in to a live video stream.
More institutions are sharing data and collaborating over the network, said Mokbel, pointing out that total backbone traffic on the network now exceeds five Gbps, a six-fold increase from the total 825 Mbps in network traffic in 2005, making ORION one of the largest and fastest-growing research and education networks.
Intra-ORION traffic now exceeds 18 per cent of total traffic, up from seven per cent in 2005. "This is a sign that our members are collaborating more and more with each other," he said. ORION institutions are also benefiting from ORION's peering agreements with commercial carriers and Internet service providers, able to offload from 15 to 50 per cent of their Internet traffic over to their ORION R&E connection.
Keynote speaker Yves Poppe, Director of Business Development and IP Services at VSNL International/Teleglobe, kicked off the Tech Workshop's afternoon program with a lively discussion on "Hyperconnectivity".
He touched on the massive growth of wireless and IP devices worldwide, predicting that 12 billion networkable devices will be in place by the year 2012. He emphasized the importance of preparing for the deployment of the new IPv6 protocol, noting that the world will run out of IPv4 addresses within the next three years.
CANARIE Chief Technology Officer, Rene Hatem, provided the audience with an update on national projects, applications and future plans for the CANARIE network. Ken Woo, Chair of GTAnet and Assistant Director of Communication Services at Ryerson, gave a brief talk on the status of GTAnet.
The workshop included updates from ORION's engineering team, led by Nadeem Junejo, Manager of Network Technologies, who presented a status report on ORION's deployment of MPLS and QoS, as well as background information on the new IPv6 Internet Protocol. Saqib Chughtai, IP Network Engineer, touched on multicasting and MRTG traffic graphs. Emmanuel Lebel, Network Operations Engineer, elaborated on WDM technologies.
New applications were hot topics. Participants received a first-hand report on Lakehead University's deployment of Google Apps from Network Administrator Andrew Brigham. Trevor Hanekamp, Senior Telecom Analyst at Sheridan Institute, presented on efforts to create a provincial videoconference network. Gary Molenkamp, Network Administrator, spoke about new projects and developments at SHARCNET. ORION's Director of Public Affairs, Andre Quenneville gave an update on ORION's partnership with the Open Student Television Network (OSTN).
VSNL International/Teleglobe and CANARIE sponsored the workshop. GTAnet and Ryerson University hosted the event.
A video stream archive and workshop presentations are available from the workshop web site at www.orion.on.ca/techworkshop07.
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