IT

Internet connection upgrade

As part of its IT infrastructure development plan, and to meet increasing demand in terms of Internet connection bitrate, in 2015 the Information Systems Department launched a plan to improve connectivity while envisaging future needs.

The Institut Pasteur had two 100 Mbps (megabits per second) Internet connections that were used simultaneously.

Huge demands were made on these connections. On average, during a typical day over 90% of capacity was used (and 100% between 10am and 6pm).

The following chart shows use of one of the connections. You can see that the connection was fully saturated from 10am onwards:

 

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This situation caused many problems (slow Internet browsing, poor audio and video quality video conferences, very long download times for large volumes of scientific data, etc.).

It was difficult to upgrade these two connections. This was particularly because the IAPs (Internet Access Providers) physically route their infrastructure (optical fiber) to the Institut Pasteur campus. Each time we upgrade the connections (bitrate increase, change of IAP) the cost and time involved is considerable (e.g. need for engineering work to bring new optical fibers to the campus).

An ambitious plan was therefore launched to upgrade the architecture of our Internet accesses as follows:

  • implementation of two very high bitrate redundant optical fibers (several tens of gigabits per second) between the campus and the Paris datacenter "Telehouse 2", which houses the majority of global IAPs

  • from now on the Institute's Internet accesses will be routed by IAPs only as far as the Telehouse, and no longer to the campus. This will significantly reduce implementation costs and times.

 

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The roll-out of the new infrastructure was completed in March 2016. Within a few weeks the first Internet access was subscribed and set up with the IAP OpenTransit (Orange's international core network unit), with the following features:

  • 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) guaranteed (5 times more than the current connections)

  • occasional operational peaks possible up to 3 Gbps

This access was operational as of March 31. A second 1 Gbps access will be set up very soon to offer high availability.

Finally, and in addition to the major IAPs, a number of companies and research centers such as the Institut Pasteur have chosen the Telehouse 2 datacenter as their location. This paves the way to very high bitrate private connections between the Institut Pasteur and its partners (enabling large quantities of data to be exchanged directly without using the Internet).

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