GÉANT Open Product Description

High Level Description

Facilitating collaboration has always been the cornerstone of GÉANT, and GÉANT Open adds to its portfolio of collaboration services to enable NRENs and researchers to interconnect with commercial teams and third party organisations.

GÉANT Open allows NRENs to arrange interconnections between external services and partners quickly and easily without the need for dedicated circuits. For example NRENs can interconnect with cloud service providers or research labs to offer access for their users. The service uses shared switches onto which all users can connect their own circuits and then interconnect with other participants in order to provide inter-organisation connectivity. The interconnections can be either at the full circuit capacity or the circuit can be subdivided to allow one-to-many or many-to-many connections as required.

This has particular benefits to international partners needing to manage multiple interconnections and wishing to harmonise their international circuits.

As a first within the European Research and Education (R&E) community, approved commercial organisations will be able to connect to GÉANT Open. This will help R&E users to access a wide variety of commercial third parties as part of private/public research projects or to access privately operated facilities or services.

Technical Description

Technical Description of the Service

Infrastructure

The eligible connectors to the Open Exchange are:

• Research and Education Networks (RENs)
• International Research Organisations, including International Research Projects and Laboratories (with approval of the local Research and Education Network)
• Commercial organisations offering services to Research and Education Networks and REN community (with approval of the local Research and Education Network)

The GÉANT Open Exchange implements an open connection policy. The Open Exchange will enable traffic to be exchanged between Research and Education Networks like European NRENs, the GÉANT backbone, regional networks (e.g. CAREN, TEIN, RedCLARA), GÉANT sister networks across the globe (e.g. ESnet, Internet2, CANARIE), and international research organisations. Traffic exchanges between connected commercial organisations and Research and Education Networks are also allowed.

GÉANT IP will be connected to the Open Exchange but only Research and Education Networks can switch traffic with it.

The Open Exchange consists of the a shared switch and the PoP facilities. GÉANT will operate the GÉANT connection(s) to the Open Exchange. Other connectors are responsible for operating their own connections to the Open Exchange. The link between the Open Exchange switch and the GÉANT IP Network is implemented with a L2 switched circuit.

Service Options

The Open Exchange offers two core services:

• Peer-to-peer policy-neutral interconnections between participating organisations connecting on GÉANT Open (with the exception of GÉANT).  
• Interconnectivity between GÉANT and other participating organisations.

These are described in more detail below.

The two services are not differentiated on a technical basis. At the technology level, the connectivity between the GÉANT network and the Open Exchange is similar to that of any other peering partner.

1. Peer-to-Peer Neutral Interconnections

This service provides connectivity between any two members. The service can be offered in two options: VLAN ID and Port to Port (or "transparent"). These are described in more detail below. The VLAN-ID and Port-to-Port-based modes are mutually exclusive. It is not possible to provision a Port-to-Port service together with a VLAN-ID service based on the same port.

The default service will be the VLAN-ID-based service.

Peer-to-peer connectivity between commercial organisations is not permitted.

VLAN-ID-Based Interconnection

The VLAN-ID-based mode interconnects two Open Lightpath Exchange (OLE) members with a Layer 2 (L2) circuit ("pseudowire"). Multiple VLAN-ID-based circuits can be provisioned for a single connector on a single port.

This is shown conceptually in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Peer-to-peer switching within the Open Exchange

Port-to-Port-Based Interconnection

The port-to-port-based or transparent mode interconnects two OLE members' ports together and provides transparent transmission of all Ethernet frames, independently from the VLAN-ID.

2. Partner Access to GÉANT Network

Access from GÉANT Open into the GÉANT network infrastructure is regulated by the GÉANT Open Policy, in order to facilitate access to the GÉANT network and for any onward connectivity to services on the GÉANT network. This is shown conceptually in Figure 2 below. This connectivity will be via the VLAN-ID mode only, as using the Open Exchange to provide port-to-port connectivity will not offer any commercial or technical advantages compared with a direct connection to GÉANT.

Figure 2: Access into the GÉANT infrastructure

Demarcation Points

The management demarcation point between DANTE and the NREN is a port on the Optical Distribution Frame (ODF) rack. The exact port will be specified at the time of the connection. The responsibility of the GÉANT Operations Centre (OC) ends at the declared demarcation point, patching beyond that point is the responsibility of the ordering NREN.

Service Description

Availability Target

Availability is defined as the total number of minutes in a calendar month during which the GÉANT Open service is available to exchange data between two connectors, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month and represented as a percentage.

The GÉANT Open availability applies only to incidents relating to a total loss of traffic for a service instance "Hard Outages", i.e., an inability to exchange data. Service is not considered unavailable until at least 60 consecutive seconds of unavailability have elapsed during any 15 minute interval

The target availability for the service is greater than 99.9%

Time to Fix a Fault and Time to Respond Target

The GÉANT Operations Centre (OC) is responsible for supporting the GÉANT Open service and provides the point of contact for all trouble ticket reports. The first-level support coverage is 24/7/365. Notifications are issued to the partner experiencing the incident within 15 minutes of incident detection by the central monitoring system.

Critical, service impacting incidents

The Time to Fix a Fault Objective applies only to incidents relating to a total loss of traffic for a service instance. Other service degradation will be investigated in-line with the non-critical incidents response level.

Non-critical incidents

This service level will apply in the event of an incident which does not result in a total loss of traffic for the service instance.

Request procedure, service implementation and delivery time

Service Implementation and Delivery Time

Requesting connection to the GÉANT Open service

Interested connectors should address their request to connect to the GÉANT Open service to the GÉANT Partner Relations team: partner-relations@geant.net

Eligibility and Connection Policies

Eligibility and connection policies are reported in the "GEANT Open Exchange Production Policy" document, available here: https://services.geant.net/plm/connectivity/geant-open/Shared%20Documents/GN3PLUS13-1439-12_geant_open_exchange_production_policy_v4_3.pdf

Pricing

GÉANT Open is provided only on a contractual basis arrangement between the GÉANT and the customer. To connect, the organisation must:

•   Finance their own way to the Open Exchange point.
•   Pay an annual connection fee

The current annual connection fee is:

•   €3,300 for 1Gb/s
•   €10,500 for 10 Gb/s
•   €36,000 for 100Gb/s