The cube consists of eight Cisco Catalyst 5000 switches that represent networks placed at the corners of a three dimensional cube and six Cisco 7513 routers placed on the faces of the cube. The design provides a highly redundant, widely distributed backbone. Each router is connected to each of the four corners of its cube face and has four equal cost paths available to it for routing. Each corner switch has connections to the routers on the three faces it touches. All cube inter-connections are currently made using Fast Ethernet.
Routers serving user networks connect to the backbone at the corners.
Server networks are dual-connected to opposite faces to provide redundancy and reliability. To date, there are no other protocols routed on the backbone. Separate networks are maintained to provide AppleTalk functionality and multicast on campus. Multicast is available all across campus, except on specific server networks. C. Stanford and Internet2 Stanford is a founding member of Internet2, a university-led effort to develop advanced network applications and the network technologies needed to support them.