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Using commercial networks and commonly available computer networking hardware, a world record has been set by Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (SUNET) for transferring large volumes of data speedily across the globe. The technical achievement occurred under real-world data-transport conditions and has meaningful implications for disaster-recovery offsite-storage applications among others. Using neither special hardware nor special connections, the Sprint/SUNET team in April sent nearly 840 gigabytes of data from a PC in San Jose, Calif., roughly halfway around the globe to associates at another PC at the University of Lulea in northern Sweden in under 27 minutes. The bulk data traveled 10,157 miles from balmy California to near the Arctic Circle across Sprint's global Internet backbone SprintLink and the GigaSUNET IP backbone at 4.23 Gigabits per second (Gbps). This result is almost three times better than the current record listed in the 2004 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. The Sprint/SUNET team's achievement has beaten the previous record held by a technical consortium using a non-public advanced research network by 12 percent. The Sprint/SUNET accomplishment was verified by a land speed record (LSR) judging committee of the Internet2 consortium of Indianapolis, Ind., which sponsors an ongoing data- transmission speed contest for highest bandwidth end-to-end networks. Sprint and SUNET are expected to receive formal recognition of their achievement in the IPv4 single-stream category at the fall I2 meeting in Austin, Texas. Details of the accomplishment can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR2/ . "For Internet users whose need for speed is a priority, this feat would be equal to streaming 600 full-length movies simultaneously out to movie theatres," explained Chase Cotton, director of data systems engineering for Sprint. This is the third major transport technical achievement announced by Sprint in the last year. Earlier this month, Sprint achieved Internet history with the first live production 40 Gigabit data transmission on an Internet backbone. Last July, the telecommunications giant successfully tested asynchronous data replication over an IP network, using Fiber Channel over IP (FCIP) technology at a distance of more than 3,600 miles. Until then, data replication was generally limited to a 150-mile radius from point of origin and considered insufficient for many current data back-up requirements. "True to our namesake, Sprint has cost-effectively demonstrated an unprecedented capability for high-speed data transfer," said Oliver Valente, Sprint vice president of Technology Development. "This is of particular importance for business continuity initiatives where data preservation requires rapid movement to safe haven, and also applies to any bulk distribution of large files over great distances." Technical Information The Internet2 organization of Indianapolis, Indiana, ( http://www.internet2.edu/ ) has defined rules for the ongoing "Internet Land Speed Record" competition ( http://lsr.internet2.edu/ ). The Sprint/SUNET team exceeded the existing record in the IPv4 single stream category by 12 percent, with a new record of 69,073 Terabit meters per second (which is a measure of distance times transfer speed). The record was set over SprintLink and GigaSunet IP backbones shared at the time by other network users. The transmission path incorporated 40 IP routers; 35 in the SprintLink network and five in the SUNET network. The end hosts were off-the-shelf Dell 2650 servers, each with only a single Intel Xeon 2.0 Ghz processor, 512 Mbyte of RAM and with the 2.0 version of the NetBSD operating system. The PCs were connected to a GigaSunet core router at the University of Lulea in Sweden and to a Sprint access router in San Jose, Calif., using Intel PRO/10GbE ten-gigabit Ethernet adapters. "This proves that carefully designed, all-purpose networks can also serve very demanding users, without using a dedicated network," said Sprint's Cotton. "Despite the great distance and speed of the Sprint/SUNET test, data integrity was maintained without loss of a single packet of information." "During the record attempt, sustained speeds of more than 4.2 Gbit/second of network traffic were achieved over the SUNET and Sprint networks," says Borje Josefsson, CTO of SUNET. "As both we and Sprint are using the Cisco GSR 12000 series of routers, we were confident that the routers could handle this type of traffic without disturbing normal network usage. The amazing thing about our record versus others is that we have done this transmission on the production infrastructure while in use by other GigaSunet and SprintLink customers." There are major challenges in doing high-speed transmissions over long- distance networks, and the complexity increases with the distances involved. "We had to understand how the distance between the hosts would affect the operating system at those speeds," said Anders Magnusson, SUNET LSR test manager. "Since TCP keeps a copy of every data packet sent until acknowledged by the receiver, that's a challenge with a long-distance connection of this magnitude. Furthermore, most computers today are preconfigured with a network traffic buffer space in the order of 15-30 kilobytes, but our IPv4 'single stream' transmission required that the buffer be in the order of 150 Megabytes. Most operating systems can't handle this very efficiently without tuning the operating system. With a good understanding of the issues and proper tuning, incredible results can be achieved even with production software and hardware."