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About

Administration
The Department of IT Support of Uppsala University has been commissioned by the board of the Swedish University Network (SUNET) to develop and maintain the SUNET archive. The main focus during the last years has been on technical matters. The content development will be the prime issue for the next years to come.

In general there are three people are involved, on part time schedules, in the daily maintainance of the system, which includes system service as well as content management and support.

To get in contact with the crew, please drop an e-mail to archive@ftp.sunet.se and we will do our very best to handle your mail promptly.

Technical information
The system is built around IBM components, consisting of a number of servers providing service to our users around the world. The servers are connected, through a virtualization engine, to the disk system and they all share same (ftp data) file system.

The main hardware includes:
  • 3 * IBM pSeries 630, 4*1,2 GHz POWER 4+ CPU, 24 GB RAM
  • 1 * IBM pSeries 630, 2*1,2 GHz POWER 4+ CPU, 8 GB RAM
  • 4 * IBM xSeries 335, 2*3 GHz, 512 MB RAM
  • 2 * IBM 2005-B32 fibre channel switches
  • 2 * IBM 2145 SAN Volume Controller
  • 4 * IBM SAN File System MDS
  • 1 * IBM DS8100 enterprise disk array.
The pSeries machines are the hosts providing actual service and the xSeries machines are used for load balancing requests over the service servers, while the rest is used to provide a flexible and high performance storage system for the data. The usable disk space is currently 13 TB.

In addition to the above some switches (and a lot of cables) are used to tie it all together, using Fibre Channel for the storage parts and Gigabit Ethernet for the rest.

Finally, it all connects to the world via Bifrost routers which is built inhouse. These are Linux PCs that handle routing and firewall functions.

Mile stones
1993The SUNET archive is initiated by the Swedish Agriculture University (SLU) in Uppsala.
1994 The archive becomes one of the most popular and widely used in the world.
1996 The archive approaches 50 GB in content and can serve 150 Swedish and 300 foreign FTP users simultaneously.
1998 Three million files are downloaded from the archive each week, at an average speed of 900 kb per second.
2000 The archive is moved from SLU to the Department of IT Support at Uppsala University.
2002 SUNET's board, along with the Department of IT Support at Uppsala University, decide that an upgrade of the hardware is necessary.
2003 The process of upgrading the SUNET archive is initiated.
2004 The new SUNET archive goes live on June 1st. Tests are still being carried out.