1. The Front Range GigaPop (FRGP) Jeff Custard Network Engineer for the Network Engineering and Technology Section at NCAR CHECO Presentation September 27, 2000

2. The GigaPop Concept

3. What Is A GigaPop?
Multiple sites agree to aggregate to a central location and share high-speed access from there, instead of each maintaining direct links to multiple networks
Share costs through sharing infrastructure
Share Commodity Internet expenses
Essentially statistical multiplexing of expensive high-speed resources
at any given time much more bandwidth is available to each institution than each could afford without sharing
Share engineering and management expertise
More clout with vendors

5. Front Range GigaPop (FRGP) http://www.frgp.net

6. FRGP History:
Initial concept — October 1999 time-frame (including decision to house at UCD)
Formed because high performance network funding was going away (vBNS)
Many discussions prior to that time regarding a “big pipe consortium” of some kind
Abilene made the GigaPOP concept lucrative
Equipment in place at UCD ~April 1999 (CSU and UW purchased routers)
First Abilene connections active ~April 1999

7. Why NCAR as the FRGP Operator?
NCAR already had GigaPop operational experience
NCAR was already serving the FRGP members
Abilene connection was an incremental addition to existing gigapop
Didn’t require a completely new effort from scratch
NCAR has a 24 x 365 NOC
NCAR is “university-neutral”

8. FRGP: Current Services
Abilene (Internet2) access
Shared Commodity Internet access to Qwest
Intra-GigaPop access
24 x 365 NOC (Network Operation Center)
Engineering and management (including monitoring and statistics)
IPv6 router
ANS’ Surveyor monitor

9. FRGP: Future Services
Shared Commodity Internet access to the two state contract providers: AT&T and C&W
Web cache servers
Akamai cache service
Client-side cache server
Netnews server
Video server
NLANR AMP machine

10. FRGP Advantages Ability to aggregate and provide economies of scale
High-quality physical environment
High-quality support
Ease of passing lots of traffic among members using existing connections
Members control the infrastructure
Aggregate news and web feeds
Easy, low-cost migration path to I2 connectivity

13. FRGP: Membership Types
Primary Member
Primary I2 FRGP member
Primary Commodity FRGP member
Secondary Users

14. FRGP: Membership Types Cont’d
Primary I2 FRGP member definition:
Must contract with the FRGP I2 Service operator (UCAR)
Must pay the FRGP I2 Service operator the costs associated with FRGP I2 transit service
Receives a single PVC/BGP peering session via FRGP equipment that can advertise approved Internet2 routes and can transit I2 traffic
Has voting membership on the FRGP Management Committee (FMC)
Has direct access to the FRGP NOC and FRGP engineers

15. FRGP: Membership Types Cont’d
Secondary Users
A "secondary" FRGP user isn't a contractual member of FRGP, but is any entity receiving FRGP services in a passthrough fashion from a primary FGRP member.
A secondary FRGP user is not a member of FRGP and the only financial and technical ties that a secondary user has are with one or more primary members
Service charges, if any, to secondary users are levied, and collected, solely by individual primary members
A secondary user does not have a PVC/BGP peering session with the FRGP for either the Commodity or I2 networks
A secondary user does not have membership on the FMC
A secondary user does not have access to the FRGP NOC or FRGP engineers

16. FRGP: Initial Primary Members
University of Colorado at Boulder
Colorado State University
University of Colorado at Denver
NCAR/UCAR
University of Wyoming

17. FRGP: New Primary Members
Colorado School of Mines
State of Colorado
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
University of Denver
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

18. FRGP: Secondary Members
Check the “Routes” list on FRGP web page for current information on FRGP secondaries

19. FRGP Contractual Foundation

20. Contractual Foundation
UCAR is FRGP operator
UCAR is the only legal FRGP entity
Each Primary member has independent MOU with UCAR
Cost agreement outlines principles of cost allocation, but amounts float from month to month
MOU delegates some authority to FMC, such as authorization to purchase equipment and to change bandwidth amounts to service providers
MOU terminable by either party without cause with 60-day notice

21. Contractual Foundation (cont.)
Primary members pay all expenses up to the FRGP demarc (FRGP ATM switch port)
All payments for FRGP expenses are made by primary members to UCAR
UCAR as FRGP operator handles all subcontracts for FRGP services and disperses all FRGP funds
UCAR bills primary members on a monthly basis, though UCAR fronts certain annual expenses such as the Abilene connect fee, and generally buffers floating expenses and floating membership numbers

22. Governance FMC: FRGP Management Committee
One voting member per MOU
Majority decisions
FTC: FRGP Technical Committee
Delegated by FMC to operate FTC on a daily basis and make operational decisions
Shared expertise among the primary members

23. FRGP: Documents
Sample FRGP Agreement, DRAFT Service Level Agreement, DRAFT Operational Guidelines, etc., can be found at:

24. FRGP Cost Sharing Policies

25. Cost Allocation
Circuit and service fees allocated proportional to rate-limited PVCs to primary members:
Abilene
Commodity
Operational costs divided equally among primary members
Engineer salary
Equipment maintenance
One-time costs divided equally among primary members
Equipment
Capital improvements

26. Example spreadsheet
Most recent spreadsheet is available if questions—please see me after the presentation

27. Useful URLs http://www.scd.ucar.edu/nets/intro/staff/jcustard

28. Almost lunch time.  But then it’s the end of Fall 2000 CHECO
Almost lunch time!  But then it’s the end of Fall 2000 CHECO and it’s back to work  Questions?