LEARN News & Highlights

LEARN Mitigates The Impact Of Commodity Internet Failure

LEARN enabled the UT System to continue its important work despite a long Internet outage.

The LEARN network enables Texas A&M University System and the University of Texas System to save money and provide critical back-up systems by sharing network resources. With the bandwidth provided by LEARN, the two university systems have been able to devise a backup architecture for commodity Internet failure by sharing each other's Internet feed, rather than each purchasing a separate backup feed. Simply put, if the commodity Internet connection to one system fails, the feed from the other system automatically picks up the load.

On May 4, 2010, the commodity Internet feed to the UT System from Qwest failed. During the 10 hours of downtime, the UT System received commodity Internet service via Texas A&M's connection to Level(3). The high speed LEARN backbone delivered the traffic, enabling UT System students, faculty and staff to continue their work without disruption.