Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network (SUNET) have claimed a new world record for transferring large volumes of data across large distances. Using neither special hardware nor special connections, the Sprint/SUNET team in April sent nearly 840 gigabytes of data from San Jose, California to the University of Lulea in northern Sweden in under 27 minutes. The bulk data traveled roughly 16,250 km (10,157 miles) across Sprint’s global Internet backbone SprintLink and the GigaSUNET IP backbone at 4.23 Gbps. The Sprint/SUNET accomplishment was verified by a land speed record (LSR) judging committee of the Internet2 consortium, which sponsors an ongoing data- transmission speed contest for highest bandwidth end-to-end networks.
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 MB 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 and to a Sprint access router in San Jose using Intel PRO/10GbE adapters.
The technical achievement occurred under real-world data-transport conditions and has meaningful implications for disaster-recovery offsite-storage applications among others. It beat the previous record held by a technical consortium using a non-public advanced research network by 12%http://proj.sunet.se/LSR2/
