DANTE and SWITCH run successful workshop on "Setting Up and Operating a PERT"

 

 

 

Cambridge, 24 October 2007:  Last month, DANTE and SWITCH collaborated to deliver the first training workshop for engineers on ‘Setting up and Operating a Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT)’, as part of the GÉANT2 project to create a Federated PERT. The course succeeded in equipping participants with the skills and knowledge to establish and operate their own national and regional PERTs, and provided expert technical insights into how performance issues can be investigated and resolved using appropriate software tools and techniques.

The training course, supported by TERENA, was held on 19 – 21 September, at the offices of SWITCH, the Swiss National Research and Education Network (NREN), in Zurich, Switzerland.  It attracted 26 participants from NRENs and universities.

PERTs create a community of network engineers, enabling them to share experience and collaborate on solving performance issues. Their goal is end-to-end performance optimisation, focused on troubleshooting network performance problems, and giving end-users guidance on quality of service issues.

“At the moment, only a few NREN PERTs exist and they tend to operate in isolation from each other,” commented Toby Rodwell of DANTE.  “This course proposed a way that independent PERTs can work together and enabled engineers to learn first-hand from the experiences of SWITCH, which operates the most advanced PERT run by an NREN.”

Toby Rodwell heads up the GÉANT2 project’s multi-domain services activity, which incorporates a key initiative to roll-out PERTs within NRENs and institutions. It also manages the central PERT which is operated by a ‘virtual team’ from within the GÉANT2 project, with members from DANTE, SWITCH and other NRENs, namely CARNET, CESNET, FCCN, GARR, HUNGARNET, PSNC, RedIRIS and RENATER.

As part of the GÉANT2 project’s evolution, the training course is part of a wider programme and represents a first step towards establishing a European federation of PERTs that will work collaboratively to offer support to end users.  Publication of a formal PERT policy is due in June 2008 and the draft plans for the Federated PERT were presented at the training course.  Valuable feedback was gathered from course attendees on the different aspects of running a PERT, which will be used to fine-tune the plans for the Federated PERT.

The PERT programme is backed up by a comprehensive and publicly accessible Knowledge Base which holds information on a wide range of network performance subjects. Several of the training sessions were recorded and are now available from the PERT Knowledge Base http://www.kb.pert.geant2.net/PERTKB/PertTrainingWorkshop.

To learn more about PERTs and how to become involved, visit our PERT pages at http://www.geant2.net/pert. For more details and to register interest about future PERT training and events contact Toby Rodwell at toby.rodwell@dante.org.uk

You can learn more about TERENA at http://www.terena.org, and about SWITCH at http://www.switch.ch.