Green GÉANT2

The Green GÉANT2 part of the GN3 network project, Network Activity 3 (Status and Trends) Task 5 (Study of Environmental Impact) (NA3 T5) team has been established to undertake a study of the environmental impact of the network.

The team is responsible for evaluating how to establish and operate 'greener' (more environmentally friendly) networks and services and has established a three stage process for this work.

Analyse the current situation: this first stage is already well underway and aims to analyse the current situation which is built on the ISO standard-based audit of the green house gas (GHG) emission of the participating NRENs.

Collection of best practices: the second stage of the process is to build a collection of best practices through which the team plans to foster links with similar activities in other regions; cooperating with the projects of other, leading research networks around the world.

Formulate proposals and recommendations: the third and final phase of the process will be to formulate proposals and recommendations.

The Green Team has adopted the ISO 14064 standard for its carbon audits. ISO defines a standard at the organisation level for quantification and reporting of GHG emissions and removals.

GN3 (The follow up project for GÉANT2)

HEAnet is actively working in several different parts of GN3 project mainly GN3-JRA1-T4 which deals with virtualisation, GN3-JRA2-T2 (further development of AutoBAHN) and GN3-NA3-T5 which is concerned with the green aspects of networking and for GN3 in particular.

Further information is available from: http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx

GÉANT3 (Bandwidth on Demand)

The aim of GÉANT BoD is to bring automatic provisioning of bandwidth upon user request to NRENs and their users across the GÉANT Service Area. The service will be offered at national level to academic, research and other users, by their NRENs.

Users of participating NRENs can use the Bandwidth on Demand service to order dedicated bandwidth whenever they need to transfer large amounts of data.

It is designed for situations where high volumes of data have to be transported between two known end points of the network. Typically this is for relatively short-term use, ranging from several hours up to several months without changes to the basic configuration.

The GÉANT's advanced BOD tool provides the most comprehensive solution, designed specifically for the multi domain environment. Provisioning can be done from the desktop with the ‘client portal’, a web based user interface to make and keep track of requests, including specifying start and end points, bandwidth, dates and times required.

Project website is http://bod.geant.net

MANTYCHORE

This is an EU funded project that is developing a platform to provision virtual networks - both bandwidth on demand and the routers that connect them - to deliver full, virtualised, easy to control infrastructure to customers as a single service.

It's use cases include:

- Virtualised Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) combining centralised physical infrastructure with a customer's own individual configuration.

- Fully routed virtual infrastructure for Grid and Cloud applications, interfacing cleanly with local campus networks.

- Scalable infrastructure for advanced high quality media services.

Mantychore services enable community controlled virtual networks on top of multiple infrastructure providers. It's objectives are:

- Enable HEAnet and NORDUnet to provide IP Network Services to their Grid and e-heatlh customers through the Mantychore tools, enhancing their service portfolio; thus providing virtual research communities with a useful service that can improve their research activities and optimize the efficiency of use of e-Infrastructures.

- Refine and expand the Mantychore services provided by means of the integrating the results of the privately funded MANTICORE II project with the IaaS Framework based solutions for optical (Argia) and Ethernet/MPLS networks (Ether); thus being able to provide integrated services at levels 1-3 to the research community.

- Innovate in the business model used in services based on IAAS, establishing a marketplace where all Infrastructure Providers can announce their available resources and all customers can automatically negotiate the SLAs getting the best resources combination for their needs. 

Further information is available from: http://www.mantychore.eu

GLIF

HEAnet can avail of the work done in the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) consortium, which is an international organisation that promotes the inter domain use of point to point links (typically 10Gbit/s circuits) for research on a global basis. Standardisation on inter domain point to point links is also stimulated by GLIF (which is done in cooperation with OGF and GN3). Further information is available from: http://www.glif.is/

Irish IPv6 Taskforce

HEAnet is actively promoting the use of IPv6 and is one of the first networks in the world to support IPv6 natively across our entire network. HEAnet is a partner in the Irish national IPv6 task force. Further information is available from: http://www.ipv6.ie/

ASO-AC, RIPE

HEAnet is a member of RPIE and several members of staff are involved in different aspects of RIPE. HEAnet is also involved in the ICANN ASO-AC NRO(Number Resource Organisation). Further information is available at: www.ripe.org and www.nro.net

The e-INIS optical network

As part of the e-INIS project, HEAnet has built an all-optical network that provides 10Gbps wavelength circuits to researchers in the project. This is effectively a high-speed local area network (LAN) operating at a national level, and with low and invariant latency. It can be used, for instance, to connect storage and computing systems, for performance as if they were co-located. Circuits can be set up and taken down with relative ease. The first two connections are to DIAS and UCC.

The optical network has its own IP address allocation, independent of the address space of any of the partner institutions. It has a routed connection to the rest of HEAnet and the Internet.

Click the network diagram for a larger version: