Overview of the College Data Network

CAEN centrally supports and maintains the College of Engineering's network. CAEN's responsibilities extend from the network backbone to the wall plate. CAEN monitors the network on a 24-by-7 basis, and on-call staff respond to significant outages on an around-the-clock basis. CAEN provides connectivity to several thousand computers across the CoE. To connect all of these computers, CAEN has built a large, multi-protocol network consisting of over 90 separate building and lab networks that span the U-M's North Campus.

The current CAEN network provides a "campus style" backbone which interconnects buildings and external network connections. The current backbone technology is gigabit Ethernet, which has also been used to connect CAEN computer labs, server networks, and individual buildings across North Campus to the backbone. CAEN will soon offer a multi-gigabit/s backbone for connecting departments.

The IEEE 802.11g CAEN Wireless network has been designed to provide an encrypted and secure wireless environment to the entire University of Michigan community, and allows the best wireless computing experience available at the U-M.

CAEN's network is connected to the networks of other University of Michigan computing service providers, including Information Technology Central Services (ITCS), which provides computing services to the rest of the U-M campus. While CAEN is the largest network provider within the College of Engineering, the University of Michigan is directly connected to a regional network operated by Merit Network, Inc. Merit connects all public universities in Michigan as well as many other Michigan educational, governmental, non-profit, and business organizations. Merit maintains multiple connections to national and international backbone networks, and connects U-M and several other Michigan universities to the high-performance networks that participate in Internet2 (See Internet2 at U-M).