GÉANT Open

GÉANT Open has been designed as a service to allow NRENs and approved commercial organisations to exchange connectivity in a highly efficient and flexible manner.

Following its successful pilot, GÉANT Open is now a fully productionised service with full NOC support and SLA monitoring of all access.

Facilitating collaboration has always been the cornerstone behind GÉANT, and GÉANT Open adds to the portfolio of connectivity services that the GÉANT network offers to its users.

The service uses a shared facility onto which all users can connect their own circuits at either 100Gbps, 10Gbps or 1Gbps, and can then request interconnections with any other participant in order to provide inter-organisation connectivity.

This has particular benefits to international partners needing to manage multiple interconnections and wishing to harmonise their international circuits. NRENs wishing to arrange private connectivity can also use GÉANT Open to facilitate these requirements.

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

Feature Highlights of GÉANT Open:

• GÉANT Open is protocol neutral at the network layer and allows each participant to connect to the exchange at between 1Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet.
• Connections can be logically subdivided into separate VLANs allowing the participant to connect with many other members of the exchange simultaneously.
• Participants can also apply to make connections from GÉANT Open through the GÉANT network –this will allow onward connectivity to organisations that are unable to connect directly to GÉANT Open.
• GÉANT Open is able to support both European and worldwide interconnects.

The diagram below shows how services connected via an NREN can use GÉANT Open to interconnect with other networks, or with services offered by commercial third parties.

Technical Specification

GÉANT Open services are built on a Juniper MX series router, currently equipped with a mixture of 1G, 10G and 100G interfaces. Juniper MX series routers are known for their high-performance Ethernet services with powerful switching features.

Connections to GÉANT Open are available using 1G, 10G and 100G Ethernet ports. 100G interfaces on GÉANT Open device are capable of terminating circuits with either LAN-PHY or WAN-PHY framing. All interfaces are presented with 1310nm optical modules with LC connectors and have a maximum reach of 10km on single mode fibre.

The MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers are also highly flexible and capable of offering a wide range of deployments styles, architectural adaptability, port densities and choices of interfaces. They also have the high reliability required to support advanced and seamless services.

Connection Partners

The following partners are currently connecting, or are actively planning connections, to GÉANT Open;

• NORDUnet
• SURFnet
• ACE/Internet2
• ORIENTplus
• GÉANT
• ESnet

To find out more about how GÉANT Open can help your business or
research project click here