Check out the gigabit router

Scot Colburn, a network engineer in SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section, takes delivery of a high-end Juniper "M-series" Internet router.

A router is an interface between two networks that finds the best route over which to send packets. It provides network management capabilities such as load balancing, network partitioning, use statistics, communication priorities, and troubleshooting tools.

The Juniper router will replace an aging Cisco router which, although it performed well for five years -- far beyond the normal three-year lifespan of a typical piece of network equipment -- has recently been experiencing problems. While the Cisco router can support data transfer rates of 100 megabits per second, the Juniper router will scale to rates of up to a gigabit per second.

The Juniper router, like the Cisco router before it, will serve as the UCAR gateway, sitting between local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). As such, it will connect UCAR/NCAR servers, desktop workstations, and supercomputers to the commodity Internet as well as to high-speed networks such as the Front Range Gigapop, Abilene, and the Boulder Research and Administrative Network.

Scot, along with NETS engineers Dave Mitchell and Pete Siemsen, plan to install the Juniper router sometime in June 2002. First, however, they must familiarize themselves with the Juniper Operating System (JUNOS), a software language that runs on top of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX. Meanwhile, they are running the Juniper router in test mode and making preparations for a smooth cutover with minimal network downtime.

Photo: Mike Martinez -- NCAR/SCD