News

TELECOM UPDATE

Network Infrastructure Upgrades 

West Virginia Network (WVNET) is currently navigating a series of challenges related to recurring fiber cuts affecting our 10Gbps Transit Ring. These disruptions have occurred at a particularly inopportune time, coinciding with critical end-of-year activities such as K–12 standardized testing and other essential services relied upon by our customers across the state.

We recognize the significant impact these outages have had on our stakeholders and are taking decisive steps to address both the immediate concerns and the long-term resilience of our network infrastructure.

Transition to a 100Gbps Transit Ring

WVNET has already procured and staged advanced networking equipment in preparation for a major upgrade to a high-capacity 100Gbps Transit Ring. This upgrade is designed to dramatically enhance the bandwidth, reliability, and fault tolerance of our core network. Unfortunately, the deployment of the 100Gbps optical waves—critical to this transition—has been delayed for over a year due to supply chain and logistical issues involving our contracted vendor and their subcontracted fiber provider.

Despite these delays, we have received renewed assurances from both parties that the necessary wave infrastructure will be delivered and operational in time for a full migration during the upcoming Summer maintenance window.

The new 100Gbps Transit Ring will be architected with diverse physical paths, significantly reducing the risk of simultaneous outages due to fiber cuts. This design will also provide WVNET with enhanced flexibility to reroute traffic dynamically in response to localized disruptions, upstream ISP issues, or hardware failures. While the migration process will necessitate a planned network outage lasting several hours, WVNET will work closely with all affected customers to schedule this transition during a period of minimal impact.

Core Router Modernization

In parallel with the Transit Ring upgrade, WVNET has acquired four state-of-the-art Cisco 9606R routers to replace the aging core backbone routers currently deployed in our Morgantown and Charleston facilities. These new routers will be configured in High Availability (HA) pairs, ensuring continuous service even in the event of a hardware failure. This modernization effort represents a significant leap forward in terms of processing power, throughput, and network resilience.

Commitment to Innovation and Service Excellence

These infrastructure investments are part of WVNET’s broader commitment to providing our customers with the speed, reliability, and scalability required to support their most ambitious digital initiatives. Whether enabling next-generation educational platforms, supporting research and collaboration, or ensuring uninterrupted access to critical services, WVNET remains steadfast in its mission to deliver world-class connectivity to the people and institutions of West Virginia.

We appreciate the continued patience and partnership of our customers as we implement these transformative upgrades

Systems Update

Kubernetes

As our systems grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all of the moving parts that come along with maintaining reliable infrastructure.

Fortunately, there exists an open-source platform that assists with orchestrating multiple applications packaged into containers. This technology, known as Kubernetes, automates a lot of the heavy lifting that comes along with managing multiple application containers across multiple servers.

What are these containers — containers are lightweight packages that include all the dependencies that an application needs to run. Everything that is essential is packaged into the container, so the container will work everywhere and maintain consistency across all systems.

With the help of Kubernetes; an Administrator can deploy multiple copies of an application, replace containers when they fail, scale applications by dynamically adding or removing instances of micro-services when traffic fluctuates, and provide load balancing to direct traffic between containers. All of these states are specified declaratively though code, simplifying the management and deployment of containers. We are focusing on utilizing this technology in the near future to harden our infrastructure.

Shifting some key pieces of infrastructure to Kubernetes will minimize our use of manual configurations, thus decreasing our configuration drift and room for unexpected failures to occur. We aim to simplify our deployment process and reduce our meantime to repair when specific services go down due to a fluctuation in traffic.

Utilizing Kubernetes is the next step in the evolution of our infrastructure management, giving us more control, flexibility, and consistency of our hosted services. As we continue to adopt new technologies, we are ensuring that here at WVNET we are better equipped to handle any problem.