Network and Server Capabilities
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The school has an excellent network infrastructure. Mary Gates Hall includes extensive wiring in each office for network connectivity. All faculty, staff, and computer classroom machines have a dedicated 100MB switched ethernet connection to a departmental Local Area Network.
Wireless ethernet is also available throughout Mary Gates Hall and much of the rest of campus. The University of Washington is currently engaged in a campus wireless initiative that will extend wireless to nearly all locations. Learn more.
Our servers have switched gigabit (over copper) ethernet connections to the network. These dedicated connections provide fast network performance for both on-site and Internet access.
The school maintains approximately 30 servers for shared file space, web services and virtual colaboration.
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The main student Windows file server is a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with dual quad core Xeon processors and 4GB of RAM that is connected to a 5 TB RAID 6 SAS storage array. All students receive 5 GB of file space on this server for their home directory and can request more space if needed.
Our student SharePoint server runs on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with dual 3.4 Ghz processors, 4 GB of RAM, and 900 GB of disk space. The SharePoint "portal" server allows students and faculty to self-provision their own SharePoint sites to support group collaboration.
The school's web server is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with 2 GB of RAM, and a 240 GB RAID array.
Additional servers include (4) backup servers with a total of approximately 20 terabyte of storage capacity, a database server that supports our website, a monitoring server that watches our network for problems and sends alerts to IT staff in the event of problems, a help desk server that runs RT (Request Tracker), an IT management server that is used to deploy desktop images, system patches, and manage our software licenses, an Intranet file and SharePoint server to support the school's administration, a development and testing server, and a variety of servers that support individual research projects.
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The school's local area network is connected to the UW campus network via Gigabit ethernet connections from our building switches to campus routers. Access to the Internet is via this connection.
The University is a leader in national networking initiatives, and was one of four inaugural sites on the Internet2 "Abilene" network using a 2.4 Gbps connection.
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The University also is home to the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP project - a regional hub for high speed Internet connections and services (see map.)