History
Originally funded through the Ontario Network Infrastructure Program (ONIP) in 1993, LARG*net was initially structured as a three-year government funded project valued at $2.2m. Primarily involving the University of Western Ontario, Fanshawe College and the London teaching hospitals, LARG*net set out to develop a community network to trial medical applications.
In 1996 when the government grant ended, LARG*net evolved into a network provider and began charging membership fees in order to sustain operations. In January 1998, LARG*net formally incorporated as a not-for-profit entity.
2008 Year in Review
The following projects were undertaken by Larg*net in 2008:
Data Center Move - On Sunday Oct 26th, Larg*net moved 1/2 of its Core and Medical Core equipment to the new Datacenter in the Support Services Building at UWO. This move involved the coordination of multiple groups to ensure that minimal downtime was involved on move day. Overall most customers were back online in less than 4 hours.
Galleria Point of Presence (PoP) - In December 2008, Larg*net brought the Galleria PoP online to serve our members in the Galleria (now Citibank) mall. The goal with the Galleria was to consolidate the satellite services for several members while providing them greater bandwidth at a reduced cost. The Galleria connection is a shared 1Gbps connection. Currently connected to the PoP are: City Of London, London Public Library, Fanshawe College, and the London Prostate Clinic. UWO continuing education will be joining soon.
Larg*net Rebranding - In August 2008, Largnet rebranded its logo as part of the 10th anniversary of its incorporation.
| Vintage Logo | New Logo |
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Service Desk Application - In May 2008, Largnet brought the AdventNet Service Desk application online to track the many inbound requests that come into Largnet. This gives Largnet the ability to analyze and review tickets and changes as well as ensure a central point to collect, share and store communications. To date over 1600 requests have been logged.
Medical Core Resiliency - The Medical Edge (known as Med Edge) previously had a single point of failure as the separation from the Med Edge to the Largnet core was through a single device. In 2008 this was corrected and now the Medical Core has full redundancy to 2 separate datacenters on UWO's campus. In this fashion the Medical Network, which services many area hospitals, now will have a failover path in the event of a datacenter going offline. This new design was implemented during the Data Center Move project.
Staffing - In July 2008 Brad Gray was hired on as the new operations manager. He brought with him many years of IT Management as well as a technical skill set.
Certifications - Over the past year Largnet staff has pushed their technical boundaries to certify themselves according to the Cisco Networking certifications. Most recently one of our staff members obtained the high certification of Cisco Certified Network Professional.
Breakdown for staff certifications are as follows:
- CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) - 2
- CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) - 2