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.