To meet the increasing demand for higher bandwidths, Belnet has modified the design of its network. The heart of our backbone now features new hardware that allows us to upgrade our other Points of Presence in a scalable manner.
The Belnet network is handling larger data streams year after year. Among other things, the exponential growth of research data is sharply increasing the demand for higher capacities.
To continue to accommodate those data flows, our network engineers have redesigned the Belnet backbone. The new design makes the network more scalable in a cost-effective way.
At the three Points of Presence (PoPs) in and around Brussels, which together form the heart of the Belnet network, new hardware from Juniper was installed in mid-February. The change occurred without any major impact for our member institutions. The PoPs in Evere, Diegem and Zaventem were equipped with new routers equipped with high-capacity ports during the interventions.
The other Points of Presence on the Belnet network can be upgraded on demand to better meet the specific needs of our customers. The PoPs Leuven-Heverlee, Leuven-Gasthuisberg, Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels-Campus will soon be migrated to the new design too. This should enable Belnet to offer multiple 100G ports to customers present in these nodes and carry larger traffic of up to 100Gbps.
Moreover, Belnet's new anti-DDoS solution has been directly linked to the new backbone devices. The upgraded backbone allows us to protect our Advanced DDoS Security customers and the Belnet network in general from large-scale attacks even better.