I-Light’s use of wave division multiplexing and modular routing and switching equipment allows for relatively quick and painless incremental upgrades to meet backbone and members’ changing needs. Major upgrades, including migration to a 100Gb backbone, are more closely coordinated with its members. Through its close relationship with its members, I-Light’s disruptive maintenance/upgrades schedules, as well as the urgency in which it responds to degraded service, are informed by the temporal needs of its members (e.g., class registration, final exams, etc.).

Through this proposal, I-Light will gain new relationships that extend directly to its members’ researchers, informing its approach to network operations. Within the context of researchers’ needs, slight service degradations (e.g., small fractions of a percent of packet loss) may need to be addressed as urgent. There may be scheduled research events, such as demos or long running computations, that inform maintenance schedules. Understanding head-room requirements can also improve capacity planning and interpretation of utilization data. In addition, this proposal expansion of the use of perfSONAR will provide a new tool for for the campus CI champion to collaborate with the GlobalNOC to diagnose and remedy network performance impairments.