Users of the pan-European GEANT2 research network are set to benefit from faster troubleshooting of performance issues through the creation of eduPERT.
A federated Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT), eduPERT will combine a collaborative European community of knowledge that can be shared across local, national and university and individual project PERTs to solve network issues as well as providing central administrative services. The launch of eduPERT also aims to foster greater use of PERTs by end-users with network issues and to encourage the formation of more performance teams across Europe.
eduPERT will create a community of network engineers, comprising existing PERT teams and new members, 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. This means that if a particular National Research Education Network (NREN) has no-one experienced in a particular technical field, requests can easily be referred to colleagues at other PERTs and they can benefit from access to their knowledge. By bringing the GÉANT2 PERT community together, support staff can more easily learn from their colleagues.
‘The GÉANT2 network is now linking 30 million users in 34 countries at speeds of up to 10 Gbps,’ said Toby Rodwell, PERT Manager, DANTE. ‘Achieving optimal, end-to-end performance across a wide range of local, national and international links is therefore vital. The formation of eduPERT provides a central information and administration hub to help support teams find the exact location of any issues quickly and to then resolve them. The eduPERT will aid collaboration and allow the sharing of knowledge between support teams across Europe and encourage the formation of new PERTs, directly helping research and education users of GÉANT2.’
eduPERT is a federated PERT that combines all the independent PERTs (the GÉANT2 PERT and the national, local, university and project PERTs) with a selection of central services, some of which are currently in development. These are management of the central eduPERT Knowledge Base, Registration for new PERTs, Accreditation (which guarantees response rates), Workshop Management (which organises eduPERT meetings) and Reporting (which compiles and submits monthly reports on activity). Accredited PERTs have greater privileges when running multi-domain network performance tests.
A number of NRENs currently have their own PERT team. One of the key objectives of eduPERT is to help every GÉANT2 NREN creates its own PERT team with support from other members. Overall, eduPERT aims to help solve network issues faster, benefiting end users.
The eduPERT website went live on 1 September 2008 and provides more information and details of registered PERTs.
