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Student registration is done over the Web from off campus or from any of the main residences, and the number of Ethernet nodes on campus has grown from a few hundred to more than 15,000. A new Novell GroupWise server farm is replacing the campus' POP mail servers--the goal is to get all students onto GroupWise by fall 2001.

High-speed Internet access has also come a long way at Syracuse during the past few years, and fierce competition in the telecom market has opened the door for affordable cable and ADSL Internet services for students who live off campus. The university also subscribes to local gigabit metropolitan area network services from Verizon Communications and Telergy to connect key buildings that need fatter pipes. Syracuse is running voice-over-IP pilots with Cisco Systems and Alcatel, and may run all its voice traffic over the backbone.

Of course, not every piece of Syracuse's network is new. Cisco switches and routers still form the core of the network, though the university now runs a switched rather than shared architecture in its buildings, according to Peter Morrissey, IT architect for the university and a contributing editor to Network Computing. All desktop PCs will be switched by year-end, and most buildings on campus will have a minimum 100-Mbps link to the backbone, Morrissey says. Plans also call for the addition of gigabit to the server farms in the university's data center, as well as to other high-volume spots on campus.

"Our goal has been to take the network infrastructure out of the performance equation so that complex, network-based applications won't experience bottlenecks," Morrissey says. "We've been successful so far."

But there's no way to prevent the inevitable software problem. "Most performance problems we experience now are caused by the applications or the servers," not the network, he says.