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Network Services

Network Services

The NORDUnet network is core to the NORDUnet mission, and providing network services is an essential part of what we do.

NORDUnet offers a wide range of network services, from a basic but high-performance shared IP service to circuit-oriented services, on-demand network services, and specialised carrier-type services such as access to the NORDUnet peering fabric.  

NDN offers to host equipment for partners or specialized applications at our main sites as well as at network points-of-precense.  

NORDUnet is not a general hosting provider, but we are happy to work with partners in hosting network equipment as well as equipment for network-related and above-the-network services.

The NORDUnet Lambda network has been built to provide research groups, projects and other activities with end-to-end, circuit-oriented services from demanding applications or community-specific networks. 

Availability

The lambda network is available to all organizations and projects within the Nordic NREN community. 

Description

Our Lambda network facility offers dedicated, on-demand, end-to-end gigabit Ethernet circuits, allowing research communities to build application-specific networks. Since the circuits are end-to-end and not shared, users have full control of bandwidth available and guaranteed connectivity and latency.  Through collaboration with globals partners, we can providers users with dedicated capacity and private network resources, end-to-end, across the globel.

Lambda services are offers on two complmentary platforms, with different service characteristics and different reach. In either case, the circuit-oriented services are provided at the same, high standard as other NORDUnet services, with full 24/7 support, high availability and the highest possible performance.

OTN Circuits

The NORUDnet optical transport platform, based on the Ciena 6500 packet-optical platform, provide 100Gbps transparent waves as well as 10Gbps OTN circuits.  Services provided on this platform are true transport-class  circuits with fully dedicated end-to-end capacity with predictable round-trip times and minimal jitter.  For 10Gbps circuits, full OTN protection is provided by default; 100Gbps are un-protected by default, but optical protection can be provided.  For both 10Gbps and 100Gbps services, the default presentation is Ehternet, but other presentations are possible.  These services are available at all nodes of the NORDUnet optical transport network in Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Hamburg, London, and Amsterdam.  In combination with similar services from the Nordic NRENs and global partners, end-to-end circuits and waves can be provided for the most demanding applications and transport needs.

MPLS Swithing Fabric

The NORDUnet MPLS switching fabric, based on Juniper swithching routers, provides a switched, fully redundant circuit service with capacities up to 10Gbps.   The service is based on the shared-capacity MPLS fabric, though, bandwidth reservation is possible.  The service allows for end-to-end circuits with Ethernet presentation, with redundancy as well as more complicated private network topologies. The service is available at all locations of the NORDUnet MPLS fabric, i.e., in the Nordic countries, north-west Europe, and North America.   In combination with similar services from the Nordic NRENs and global partners, end-to-end circuits and more complex, private networks can be provided for global user communities.

“The concept of an Open Exchange is to ensure carrier-neutral policy-free exchange of traffic between any connected partner network thus ensuring easy non-discriminatory interchange of communication”

NORDUnet strongly supports the open exchange concept and will ensure that the NORDUnet exchanges are operated and managed in line with best practices.

NORDUnet Open eXchange Points offers 10GE and 100GE connectivity allowing both R&E networks and commercial service providers to interconnect at their discretion with no Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) imposed by NORDUnet.

NORDUnet can offer connectivity between NOX-HEL and a number of other European Open Exchange Points, including other NOX nodes, for our R&E Network partners.

A generic NOX is designed using existing NORDUnet routers and infrastructure. The NOX itself consists of one or more router blades that are managed in a separate logical system.

The Peering Service is supported by NORDUnet’s global IP backbone and extended peering infrastructure. Our aim is to provide the European NREN community with a neutral high quality IP service towards the commercial Internet and content providers. Through joint collaboration with the European NREN community, we can improve the service for the benefit of all participants and thereby increase the likelihood of establishing new peers.

Availability

The Peering Service is available to all members of the European NREN community

Description

Two connectivity options are available: a 10-Gbps or a 100-Gbps Ethernet port. The 10/100-Gbps ports can be either flat rate or metered.

Network reliability and quality:

  • Quarterly service availability is 99.9% for single connected and 99.995% for redundant connected services.
  • Average packet loss is less than 0.01%.
  • Average round trip delay is:

Inter Europe (excl. Iceland)            < 40ms

Europe Mainland to US East           < 60ms

Inter US                                               < 50ms

Technical details:

Full service:

The full Peering Service provides you with a standard full Internet table allowing for global connectivity. Where available the traffic delivery is leveraging on our direct peers and an upstream network is used for the remaining destinations.

Partial service:

The partial Peering Service provides you with a subset of the global Internet routing table. Only the prefixes learned from our direct peers are provided and prefixes are only announced to those peers. We learn roughly 80% of the global table from direct peers, and we will continue to increase this percentage. Access to global connectivity would require an alternative upstream network.

Connection options:

Interface Type

Range

XC-Type

VLAN

LACP

10 Gigabit Ethernet

LR, ER

SM-Fiber

 

Nx 10 Gigabit Ethernet

LR, ER

SM-Fiber

100 Gigabit Ethernet

LR, ER

SM-Fiber

 

Nx 100 Gigabit Ethernet

LR, ER

SM-Fiber

Routing information:              IPv4                             IPv6

Routing Type                            BGP                               BGP

Linknet NORDUnet                    ✓                                   ✓

Linknet Size                               /31                                /127

MD5 Authentication                  ✓                                   ✓

BFD                                               ✓                                   ✓

 

Route filtering:

An exact match IP prefix-list filter will be installed on your BGP sessions. The filter will be populated according to information extracted from your provided ASN Set/Macro. Separate filters for IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes are maintained and updated automatically every 24 hours, or at request. In order for new prefixes to become globally visible behind NORDUnet a route-object associated with your ASN Set/Macro must be defined. Based on the number of defined prefixes in the ASN Set/Macro a 10% increase of the absolute number will be applied as a maximum-prefix setting on the BGP session.

 

NORDUnet POPs:

The full or partial Peering Service can be provided at the following points-of-presence:

 

Location                                         Datacenter     

Amsterdam, the Netherlands           SARA/Vancis     

Copenhagen, Denmark                    UNI-C     

Copenhagen, Denmark                    Telia Ørestad
Copenhagen, Denmark                     Interxion Copenhagen     

Frankfurt, Germany                         Interxion FRA2

Hamburg, Germany                         Centurylink Wendenstrasse 379

London, United Kingdom                 Equinix LD8 (Harbour Exchange Docklands)

Stockholm, Sweden                         STOKAB Thule    

Stockholm, Sweden                         Telia STK2

Stockholm, Sweden                         Interxion Kista

Stockholm, Sweden                         Telecity Bromma

Geneva, Switzerland                       CERN CIXP

Helsinki, Finland                             FUNET

New York, USA                                32 AoA “The hub”

Washington, USA                             Equinix Ashburn

Miami, USA                                     NOTA

Miami, USA                                     zColo

Chicago, USA                                  Equinix Chicago

Palo-Alto, USA                                Equinix Palo-Alto

Reykjavik, Iceland                          RIX-K2

Reykjavik, Iceland                          RIX-TG

Reykjavik, Iceland                          Verne 

If you wish for service termination in a different POP within the same metropolitan area, we will review other locations on a case-by-case basis.

To secure the best possible commodity internet service for the Nordic research and educational networks NORDUnet A/S operates a global IP network and is currently present at the following Internet eXchange points:

  • AMS-IX in Amsterdam
  • NL-IX in Amsterdam
  • Asteroid International in Amsterdam
  • DE-CIX in Frankfurt
  • ECIX in Frankfurt
  • ECIX in Hamburg
  • DIX in Copenhagen
  • Netnod in Copenhagen
  • Equinix in Ashburn (Washington D.C.)
  • Equinix in Chicago (IL)
  • Equinix in Palo Alto (CA)
  • LINX in London
  • LONAP in London
  • NETNOD in Stockholm
  • STHIX in Stockholm
  • NIX in Oslo
  • NOTA in Miami
  • FL-IX in Miami
  • NYIIX in New York
  • RIX in Reykjavik

We are also present at selected R&E Focused Internet Exchange points

  • Netherlight in Amsterdam
  • GÉANT Open in London
  • NOX-HEL in Helsinki
  • MANLAN in New york
  • WIX in Washington
  • PacificWave in California
  • MOXY in Montreal

Other than public-peering on exchange points we do have multitude of private peerings on dedicated circuits with big service providers as well as cloud providers. A selection of redundant private peers on dedicated circuits are;

  • Amazon (with on-net access to AWS direct-connect)
  • Microsoft (with on-net access to Azure on-premises)
  • Akamai (with a on-premises caching infrastructure to support local offloading)
  • Google (with a on-premises caching infrastructure to support local offloading)
  • Facebook
  • Netflix
  • Dropbox
  • Apple
  • Twitch.TV
  • Edgecast
  • Valve Software
  • Vodafone Global

…And many more.

Dedicated private peerings is an area of focus for both us and the market in general so this is expected to grow significantly.

NORDUnet was the first network outside the US accepted to provide a root DNS server. This root name server was officially recognized on 28th July 1991. The root name servers handle the top of the domain-tree, and provide information to other name servers on how to find information about .com, .net, .org or a national top-level domain name.

Nordic WLCG Tier-1 is part of the CERN worldwide calculator

  • Stored: in Bergen, Oslo, Copenhagen, Espoo, Umeå and Linkjøping
  • Network: provided by NORDUnet
  • Around 10 Petabyte data coming in – aper year

 

The Nordic Tier1 is one of 13 regional computing centres of the Worldwide LHC computing Grid, (WLCG), the huge international e-infrastructure that provides computing and storage for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

As CERN does not have the resources to crunch all of the data on site, it resorts to grid computing to share the workload with computer centres around the world. The WLCG is a global collaboration of more than 170 computing centres in 42 countries, linking up national and international grid infrastructures to store, distribute and analyse the ~100 Petabytes (100 million Gigabytes) of data annually generated by the Large Hadron Collider. The grid is arranged in four layers, called Tier 0, 1, 2 and 3. Tier 0, the server farm at CERN itself, is the first point of contact between experimental data from the LHC and the Grid. From there data is distributed and processed, giving a community of over 8000 physicists near real-time access to LHC data.

Giant calculator

Or as they say at CERN: The world is our calculator.

The Scandinavian part of this giant calculator, the Nordic Tier1, developed under the auspices of NORDUnet, takes its share of the LHC data torrent. Just like the other 13 Tier1s – but yet differently. The NT1 is unique, as it is distributed between seven different locations and not concentrated in one location.

This setup was chosen out of political and financial reasons. The Nordic countries wanted a Tier1 site, but couldn´t agree on where to locate it. So, building on the Nordugrid initiative, they chose to distribute the site instead. That decision made the network aspect of the project crucially important, and so it was decided to hand over the responsibility for building and operating the site to NORDUnet.

At that time, around 2006, the other countries involved in the Worldwide LHC computing Grid met the Nordic decision to build a computing centre distributed across four countries with scepticism. The grid itself being distributed, why build a distributed Tier1 also? People shook their heads at the Northerners, but eventually that stopped, when the NT1 proved stable and dependable. And moreover, the NT1 now often is emphasized as a prime example of how you can effectively build and maintain this kind of computing centres. Among other things, some of the tailor made software developed by the Nordic programmers is now widely used in the WLCG community.

Private Nordic network

The NT1 receives, stores and pre-processes data from CERN, making it available through a “private” network to the Nordic high energy physics community of approx. 150 people, and to other researchers around the globe. The total inflow of data is around 10 Petabyte per year, 3 PB coming from CERN and the remaining 7 PB from other sites around the world and in the Nordics.

In 2013 the responsibility for the NT1 was shifted from NORDUnet to the Nordic e-infrastructure collaboration, Neic. However, NORDUnet is still a vital part of the setup, providing network between the seven NT1 locations, the 7th being Slovenia. Each location consists of two to three racks of servers and a tape robot for long time storage. Data is stored for 30 years. Furthermore, the NORDUnet network operations centre collaborates with NEICs own staff in monitoring the site 24/7.

Since launched in 2006 the Nordic Tier1 has proven its robustness and value. But still, a distributed computing and storage centre has both benefits and disadvantages. Among the benefits is the fact, that it’s always possible to store the data, as long as only one of the seven locations is operational. Among the disadvantages is the fact that having seven sites instead of one means there are seven times as many error sources.

In an ongoing discussion about pros and cons regarding a distributed vs. a centralised site, there is now an evaluation under way, to decide whether to stick with the current solution or to switch to a centralised one instead.