SURFnet connection to US to use Global Crossing VPNUtrecht 17 October 2001 The Dutch national research network SURFnet will use the newly announced ExpressRoute IP VPN service from Global Crossing for the direct connection between its POP in Amsterdam and the StarLight research facility in Chicago in the USA. The connection will run through Global Crossing?s high-speed fiber optic backbone.
SURFnet operates the Dutch national research network which connects over 200 institutions in higher education and research in the Netherlands. It is also a key partner in the GigaPort project, a testbed for new Internet technology, also open to Dutch industry. The SURFnet5 backbone runs at 10 Gbit/s, and is one of the fastest in the world.
SURFnet and GigaPort have signed contracts for two Global Crossing services: IP Transit and ExpressRoute IP Transit is a high-speed Interet access service which allows customers to build efficient environments at relatively low cost. Global Crossing?s ExpressRoute provides seamless high-throughput over an MPLS-enabled backbone.
ExpressRoute is useful to SURFnet because of its ability to transport large volumes of IP-based traffic between European and U.S. sites without having to undergo protocol conversions that may limit the performance of such traffic. Global Crossing?s impact on SURFnet5 is expected to result in significant link efficiencies gained by not having to carry the overhead that prior switching technologies exacted on IP traffic.
The new Global Crossing IP VPN Service devlivers Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees that are supported by Service Level Agreements covering availability, packet loss, latency, and jitter, based on the selected service option. It consists of three complementary offerings: It consists of three complementary offerings: SmartRoute, ExpressRoute, and Premises-Based IP VPN Service.
SmartRoute is a wide-area networking option gives enterprises the ability to identify and prioritize data traffic based on various criteria, including traffic origination or termination sites or nature of the business application. Differentiated performance for each class of service is backed by Service Level Agreements. SmartRoute is a policy-based VPN that provides a range of network-based security measures including IPSec tunneling as well as a fully integrated firewall service to protect sensitive and privileged information. Specific IPSec customer tunnels are established to segregate each customer?s traffic and ensure full traffic privacy.
ExpressRoute IP VPN provides traffic routing and management intelligence maintained within the core of the Global Crossing network. ExpressRoute IP VPN uses MPLS technology (RFC 2547) and advanced edge routers to create customer-specific private tunnels across the Global Crossing IP backbone. The ExpressRoute IP VPN Service option is ideal for enterprises and service providers with high bandwidth requirements (up to OC-12/STM-4 as well as Gigabit Ethernet) that require maximum networking efficiency and scalability. ExpressRoute IP VPN provides a usage-based billing model.
The Premises-Based IP VPN Service option provides enterprises with IP VPN capabilities with integrated security services and end-to-end network management. It is designed for companies seeking a highly secure, site-to-site IP VPN solution, with low to medium transport bandwidth requirements, and a limited number of regionally deployed sites. Access and routing hardware are owned by the customer and reside at the his premises, and are managed by Global Crossing.
The Global Crossing IP VPN Service is currently available in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
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