Cable guys rewire the Mesa Lab . . .

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by Lynda Lester If you haven't seen them yet, SCD's Network Engineering and Technology Section (NETS) could be coming soon to an office near you. NETS staff are rewiring, retrofitting, and remodeling -- in a word, transforming -- the UCAR/NCAR LAN (Local Area Network). Their goal is to bring the network infrastructure up to standard (and speed!) so that NCAR can move into the Year 2000 with a fast set of wires and state-of-the-art communications. SCD calls these net efforts the Network ReEngineering Project, or NREP -- a colossal undertaking that encompasses 15 smaller projects. NREP goals include: Restructuring legacy backbone networks and routing structures Designing a simpler and more rational communications system Providing faster network links Replacing old routers, bridges, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches Installing an ATM fabric to replace five Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) rings The biggest NREP rewiring project is the Mesa Laboratory Network Access Completion project -- MLNAC for short. MLNAC involves a complete overhaul of the Mesa Lab's wiring infrastructure, including installation of ultra-modern, optical-fiber wiring. It's not easy. When NETS technicians bore through concrete walls and pull wire overhead and underfoot, people notice. In fact, when the NETS heads move in (porting cable, tools, tubes, and weirdly blinking test devices), NCAR staff move out, relocating temporarily to home, tmpdir, or Argentina. Marla Meehl, NETS manager, says that both MLNAC and its parent project NREP are going according to schedule and should be completed by the end of the year. We'll all be glad. Thank goodness they're replacing the unintelligent, repeater-based, shared-media, end-user networks with high-speed, state-of-the art, high-port-density Ethernet packet switches connected with ATM fabric using Virtual LAN/Emulated LAN technology to simplify the host add-move-change problem by allowing multiple logical networks to coexist on a single physical infrastructure!

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