Page1    Page164                                                                        Page166  Page177

Appendix 31. Status Report from France for ICFA-SCIC

RENATER

151 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013 Paris ­ France

Dany.Vandromme@renater.fr

http://www.renater.fr

Last updated January, 2007

Update on the Research Networks in France:

There is a unique network infrastructure in France, to serve Research and Education

communities. This infrastructure is made on one side, of a national backbone operated by GIP

RENATER, and on the other side of a collection of regional/metropolitan networks, connected to

RENATER backbone. RENATER is providing both international connectivity mostly through the

pan-European backbone GEANT, and commodity traffic through two dedicated access to a

worldwide IP Transit network and one access to a major Internet exchange point in Paris

(www.sfinx.fr).

National backbone infrastructure:

The current infrastructure has been renewed in 2005, following a long public procurement

procedure. The current version will be in operation till 2008. It is made, for its main components

of WDM loops interconnecting all RENATER points of presence in France. The standard

capacity is 2.5 Gb/s for all WDM segments. These loops are reconfigurable in a quasi-automated

mode, in case of failure of any segment. Furthermore the IP routing has also the capacity of

adapting the routing tables in order to redirect traffics if needed. These two features make a very

highly resilient network, for which any maintenance or incident is handled without any impact for

users.

Figure 96 and Figure 97 show the map of the national backbone. All the RENATER PoPs are

located on university or research institute premises (for instance IN2P3 is hosting the RENATER

PoPs in Lyon and Caen), and all PoPs are themselves dually connected to the WDM provider

infrastructure to improve further the network resilience at the metropolitan level.

The RENATER PoPs are used to connect the regional/metropolitan networks of the

corresponding region/city but also to establish direct connection for local user sites. The standard

bandwidth for these connections is 1 Gbps (GigaEthernet).

Instead of being made of leased WDM circuits only, the RENATER backbone is complemented

with a dark fibre footprint interconnecting the following PoPs: Paris, Rouen, Caen, Rennes, Lille,

Nancy, Strasbourg, Lyon, Genève, Grenoble, Marseille, Sophia, Montpellier, Toulouse and

Cadarache (ITER). This part of the network infrastructure will be primarily used to serve large

scale scientific projects such as LCG/LHC, DEISA, or GRID'5000, a nationwide grid initiative.

With this collection of switched optical segments, projects will be provided with e2e optical

services without going through a number of expensive routing equipments. International

extension of these optical paths will be provided also through the GEANT2 pan-European

backbone or through a few cross border fibers with neighboring countries. Current cross border

infrastructures are being deployed with Switzerland and Germany. More CBF are under

preparation with Spain and UK. The CBF infrastructure is being used as a secondary circuit (10

165