Speed record set for public network data transfer

Computerworld - Sprint Corp. and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (Sunet) announced today that they have set a world record for transporting a large volume of data over a public network.
The companies said they sent nearly 840GB of data from a computer in San Jose to another one 10,000 miles away at the University of Lulea in northern Sweden in less than 27 minutes. That much data is equivalent to 140 full-length movies in digital form.
The data transfer shows how companies and organizations with mountains of data can use the Internet to provide disaster recovery and off-site storage functions quickly, Sprint officials said.
The transfer, done in April and validated only recently, is about three times faster than the current record listed in the 2004 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.
Officials said no special hardware or connections were needed, as the data traversed Sprint's global Internet backbone, SprintLink, and the GigaSunet IP backbone at 4.23Gbit/sec. Along the way, it traversed 40 IP routers, 35 of which were in the SprintLink network. The end hosts were standard Dell 2650 servers, each running a single Intel Xeon 2-GHz process with 512MB of RAM.
The PCs were connected to a GigaSunet core router at the University in Sweden and to a Sprint access router in San Jose, using Intel Pro 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. Both companies use GSR 12000 series routers from Cisco Systems Inc.
The data was transmitted over the public network while it was being used by other customers of the two companies.

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