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GÉANT presents a large number of services which are used by the community and internally. These publicly exposed services have, in most cases, further dependencies on hidden services such as authentication systems and databases. The expectation is that these services should be available 100% but in actuality they occasionally fail. Given this, duplicate copies of some services exist to provide redundancy, and while they are designed to protect from loss of data, failing-over the user interface requires manual intervention, which incurs a delay until carried out by an operator (this can sometime extend to a day or two if the outage occurs at the weekend, for instance). A further problem exists in that even where a service provides redundancy at the data and user-interface level, dependent service upon which they rely often are not redundant which means that there is nothing to fail over to and the underlying service needs to be repaired before the service can be is fully restored.
The following describes structures and facilities that will be introduced to improve service resilience and reliability in GÉANT.
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