The Works of DANTE - Issue 5

Development week aims to perfect perfSONAR

The perfSONAR Team met up during the weeklong GÉANT2 Technical Workshop to discuss current and future work in perfSONAR. The main focus of the meeting was to discuss quality and ease of use issues. PerfSONAR is the monitoring tool developed jointly by GÉANT2, Internet2 and ESnet, and for the first time, will enable an end-to-end view of network performance between interconnected networks. Until perfSONAR was developed, there was little consistency in the presentation of monitoring data, requiring network managers to use different tools for each network they monitored.

Based on the feedback received from early adopters of perfSONAR services, the team decided to focus more effort to improve not only the quality of their products but also the ease with which these products can be installed and used. The need to incorporate security features (Authentication and Authorisation) within perfSONAR was also prominent on the list of actions.

Discussions with members from GÉANT2’s research activity on Mobility and Roaming (who are working on the eduGAIN Authentication and Authorisation infrastructure) helped both teams in charting the way forward on this front. Meetings with engineers from GÉANT2 research activities "Bandwidth on Demand" and "Test Beds" were also held to ensure good knowledge transfer within the project’s various engineering teams.

The effort within perfSONAR to develop new services will continue. Services are currently being designed to export measurement data from point-to-point, SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) and Gigabit Ethernet circuits. The perfSONAR team and DANTE are working on implementing a pilot service, which can provide access to GÉANT2 SDH data. For more information on GÉANT2’s joint research activities visit www.geant2.net/research