Cornell University Weill Medical College

The Weill Medical College of Cornell University, located in New York City, is among the top-ranked clinical and medical research centers in the country. The Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences is part of a large biomedical complex that includes three major medical centers in the region. The Medical College is divided into 20 academic departments: seven focus on the sciences underlying clinical medicine and thirteen encompass the study, treatment, and prevention of human diseases and maternity care.

Cornell Weill Medical College is linked to New York Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Hospital for Special Surgery, and Rockefeller University with an extensive, tightly integrated switched Gigabit Ethernet network. At the present time, the collapsed backbone Gigabit network spans a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and includes additional WAN lines.

Three overlapping ISPs link Cornell Weill Medical College to the outside world. At peak hours, the network connects to roughly 10,000 internal logical addresses, and typically runs 30-40 MBits/sec. With over 250 Mbits of internet connectivity, the network must be able to handle massive amounts of traffic on a daily basis.

Dr. Steven M. Erde, Chief Security Officer and Senior Director of the Office of Academic Computing at the University, relates that monitoring and troubleshooting this huge, diverse network is their main issue, while security is another important concern. "We want to figure out what is happening with our network at any moment. We also need to be able to detect web attacks, viruses, worms, and security breaches."

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