The obvious signs of the construction taking place at the bridge in the heart of MSU’s campus are dwindling as Farm Lane was reopened to vehicular traffic early this month. While construction continues into August, vital behind-the-scenes work was completed this past winter to ensure the north and south ends of campus stay connected to the MSU network.
Over numerous evenings late last year, teams from MSU IT installed a bypass fiber optic network and moved services from under Farm Lane Bridge without impacting campus connectivity.
“By design, when an MSU IT project is successful, you don’t see any impact,” said Scott Bryan, program manager for MSU IT infrastructure initiatives. “We did all of this work without affecting services because of the many years of engineering and design that went into this level of redundancy.”
The project team drilled a new pathway under the river to reroute the active fiber connections underneath the bridge and installed new communications vaults. In total, MSU IT performed close to 100 live circuit cutovers for many different campus systems, including campus Internet, border firewall, campus core network, internal firewalls, feeds to many campus buildings, cell service, desktop phone service, and cable TV, according to Doug Nelson with the MSU IT Network team.
“The team spent countless hours doing the prep work for the cutover events to ensure that we understood which services and connections were in use on any fiber segment,” Nelson said.
The new route places the proper network infrastructure for future expansion. In creating the new route, MSU IT was able to recover 5,200 feet of 144-strand OSP fiber optic cable that can be deployed again on campus, said Doug Resseguie, a manager within MSU IT Infrastructure and Technology.
“This effort involved careful extraction from the underground vaults to an above-ground Cable spool trailer and then back to our cold storage area,” Resseguie said. “This was great stewardship.”
According to Bryan, the years of engineering design that went into planning redundancies within the network provided for zero campus outages throughout the effort.
“It was vital we ensure the availability and reliability of technology services that the university has come to expect as a commodity,” Bryan said. “If things didn’t go well, it would be a big impact.”
Bryan said moving the fiber before demolition took place on the bridge last winter was vital.
“This behind-the-scenes work is so important to campus operations,” Bryan said.
The planning that went into the project, from a network infrastructure aspect, was paramount, said Kevin Webert, with MSU IT Infrastructure and Technology.
“They started this project with a defined set of goals, and seamlessly brought us to the finish line,” Webert said. “Three years ago, this was a daunting lift, and is now a completed project that couldn’t have been done without a fantastic team effort from MSU Telecom, Engineering, and IT.”
Webert acknowledged the growth and skill of the MSU Telecom team helped make the project a success.
“Ten years ago, this may have not been possible with a Michigan State Telecom crew,” Webert said.” Much of this work would have been contracted out. In the last seven years, we have built a team that can handle any job that comes our way.”
