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The Great Plains Network |
| ... advanced networking technology in support of collaborative research and education ... | |
| Business Plan |
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The Corporation GPN, Incorporated, will be Kansas based firm located in the Kansas City area providing network services for the institutions of higher education in the Great Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. It will be non-profit corporation consisting of members from the institutions of higher education as defined by the bylaws of the corporation (Appendix A). The membership, as represented by a Board of Directors, will form the decision making body of the corporation. The Mission
The mission of the corporation will be to provide high performance
network services to the institutions of higher education in the
Great Plains area. GPN will facilitate collaboration
among its member institutions for the purposes of meritorious scientific
investigations, development of advanced network capabilities, and
enhancement of the inter-university network infrastructure.
Advanced network services will be provided by GPN to its member
institutions. Aggregation of traffic and connectivity to other
networks will be among those services. They will include connectivity
to the vBNS, to other agency networks, and to the commodity Internet.
Connectivity to other private networks will also be possible, if
such connections enhance the services provided to the member
institutions or decrease the costs of the membership.
Facilitating collaboration between the member institutions and the
Internet2 community will also be an important service provided by
corporation. GPN will be expected to serve as a focal point for
high performance network activities within the Great Plains region. The
creation of centralized services, such as data caching engines or centralized
routing facilities, as developed by the Internet2 community, will
be an additional service important to the membership.
The target market of GPN will be the institutions of higher
education in the Great Plains region. However, other entities may
obtain services from the network. These entities will be called
affiliated networks and may attach to the network in order to obtain
services, or to provide services to their members.
For example, an affiliated network might be state network
which represents one or more members for the purpose of billing or aggregating
connectivity, or a private corporation which has formed a research
partnership with a member institution. Initial connectivity is
envisioned to be, in almost all cases, organized through affiliated
networks at the state level.
There are many Internet service providers which offer connectivity to the commodity Internet, but few offer the types of services envisioned by GPN. Aggregation of traffic, and connectivity to both the vBNS and to agency networks, is rarely provided. The experimental nature of the Internet2 project makes it difficult at best for profit-based providers to participate. Moreover, most Internet service providers have a client base consisting of commercial entities and are unwilling to facilitate the type of collaboration essential to the higher educational community. Management
Management of the corporation will be by a Board of Directors as
described by the bylaws (see Appendix A).
An Executive Director will be appointed by the Board of Directors
and will be responsible for the day to day operations of the
corporation. The Executive Director will also be responsible for
submitting the annual budget of the corporation to the Board of
Directors for approval. All employees of the corporation will
report to the Executive Director.
The operation of the corporation will be the responsibility of the
Executive Director. The Board of Directors will approve the annual
budget, and therefore the number of employees. It is expected that
the corporation will require a minimum of two employees. These
two will include the Executive Director and will assume all the
management and engineering functions needed to run a high performance
network. Office space and secretarial help will also be required,
but these may be shared with a participating institutions, whenever
possible. The hiring of employees and the paying of benefits can
also be obtained through a separate organization. Collocation of
equipment will be obtained from either circuit vendors or member
institutions, and NOC services will be out-sourced to either a
private vendor or a member institution.
The expenses incurred by the network will include such items as
salaries, circuit costs, collocation costs, office space, and
equipment costs. Income will come from the the dues imposed on
the membership. Members may choose to delegate an affiliate network
to pay their dues. For example, a state network, in which their
are two member institutions, may pay the dues for those two members.
Dues will be imposed so as to retain the non-profit status of the
corporation and to insure successful operation of the network. Dues may
vary according to the services obtained by the member or the affiliate network.
These may be related to circuits costs, connection to the vBNS, connection
to an agency network, connection to the commodity network, or use of
other services provided by the corporation.
Stage of Development and Future Goals
Incorporation of GPN has not yet occurred, and will not occur until legal
necessity dictates. The corporation is currently run as a consortium of
the membership with the Bylaws in place as if it were incorporated.
This business plan is designed to support a corporation (consortium)
for a period of time of from three to five years. During that time
period, many of the advanced network services developed by the
higher educational community will have migrated to the commodity
Internet, and the need for an aggregation point devoted to the
development of high performance networking may not exist.
A reassessment of the need for the corporation should take place at that time.
GPN, Incorporated will be a Kansas-based company providing
network services to the institutions of higher education in the
Great Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. Corporate headquarters will be
located in Lawrence, KS.
Mission
The mission of the corporation will be to provide high performance
network services to the institutions of higher education in the
Great Plains region.
The goals of the corporation include:
The members of the corporation, as defined by the bylaws
(see Appendix A), my be represented by an
affiliate network for the purposes of billing and connectivity.
For example,
the University of Kansas and Kansas State University may be members
of the corporation, and yet may be represented by the consortium
KANREN for purposes of billing and connecting to the network. KANREN would
be an affiliated network which provides some of the GPN services
to its own member institutions.
Services
The primary focus of the corporation will be operate the Great Plains
Network to provide connectivity and network support to satisfy the
requirements of the recent EPSCoR/NSF grant (EPS 9720159).
The corporation will provide high performance network services to
the institutions of higher education in the Great Plains region.
It will provide the advanced services necessary for members
to participate in high performance networking projects, such as functioning
as as an Internet2 "gigapop".
Commodity Internet connectivity will be provided to those members
which desire such services. One of the important
functions of the corporation will be to leverage commodity Internet
connection costs to its members, and to provide
increased reliability for those types of connections.
It will be especially important for the corporation to bring new
services to its member institutions.
The corporation expects to promote the creation of the
tools, applications, measurement techniques, and communication
channels necessary to support high performance network services.
Additional services will include connections to other networks such as
many of the agency networks currently in existence and to other
private networks which may wish to contract with member institutions.
Such services will help promote the research and educational missions
of the campuses within the region.
The GPN evolved from the Great Plains Network with the intention of
supporting the creation of a high performance network in the region.
The Great Plains Network is a consortium of Great Plains
states and universities dedicated to supporting scientific research
in those states through the use of networking technology. Assisted
by the NSF EPSCoR program, the consortium intends to construct a
very high speed network connecting the state networks and major
universities in the states of:
The consortium has received a grant for approximately $1.4 million over 2 years
from the NSF EPSCoR program. Together with matching funds, there
is approximately $2.5 million available to support the necessary
connectivity between the states. This money is intended to support
only the connectivity between the states and is not intended for connections
to either the commodity Internet or to the vBNS. The grant is
currently being administered by the Center for Research, Inc. (CRINC)
at the University of Kansas, and the principal investigator is Jerry Niebaum,
Executive Director of Information Technology Services at The University
of Kansas. Administration of the grant is to be guided by a management
committee, a national advisory board, and a technical implementation
committee. GPN will operate the networking facilities and provide
the services required by the Great Plains Network.
The Internet2 Initiative
As an outgrowth of the recent Internet2 initiative, the members of the
consortium have indicated a desire to expand the goals of the network
to include those of Internet2, and they have also indicated a desire
to enhance their commodity Internet services by facilitating new
connections through the resulting Great Plains Network.
The existence of the corporation is the result of the decisions of the
consortium to expand the role of the network. In addition, this
larger role includes the University of Missouri
at Columbia.
The participating institutions in the Internet2 project include
In addition, an essential participant in the organization has been the
EROS Data Center. While not an Internet2 member, recent decisions
have indicated that EROS will be connected to the vBNS, and therefore
may play a vital role in GPN.
Legal Status
GPN will be incorporated under the laws of the state of Kansas as a
non-profit organization when legal necessity requires. Until that time, the
organization will operate as a consortium. When and if incorporation
occurs, the corporation will be defined by section 501(cd)(3) of the
Internal Revenue Code.
Funding of the corporation will be by an initial membership fee followed by
yearly dues from the member institutions. These dues are to be set by
the Board of Directors, as defined by the By Laws of the corporation.
The network is not yet in operation, nor has the corporation approved a
set of bylaws or filed for legal status at this time.
The target market for the corporation will be the institutions of
higher education in the Great Plains region. These are the members
of the corporation and the Board of Directors come precisely from
that clientele.
The universities in the United States participated in an essential
way in the creation of the Internet. The existing Internet has
now become a commodity item, even an essential one, to many of the
corporations, organizations, and individuals throughout the world.
The resulting growth of the network, however, and the lack of
available bandwidth has made the network difficult to use at best,
severely limiting many of our finest researchers and educators. One
of the reasons for forming an Internet2 gigapop is to provide
aggregation of traffic and services within the region for the
institutions of higher education, and to thereby gain control of
the inter-university connectivity.
This does not mean, however, that the services to be offered by
the network will only be available to university systems. Those
services may also be provided to affiliated networks, which in many
cases will be the state networks in the region. The services
may also be provided to other types of organizations. For example,
a private network providing library services may wish to connect
to the network for the purpose of providing services to the member
institutions, or a corporation may wish to provide research facilities
through a network connection.
Voting membership in the corporation is open to the institutions
of higher education.
The current network industry is ill prepared to provide the types of services required by the higher educational institutions in the Great Plains region. This is especially true of high performance network requirements such as quality of service guarantees and other advanced protocols related to the Internet2 project. There are numerous Internet Service Providers (ISP's) in the area, both large and small, but few provide the type of collaborative and participatory environments beneficial to the institutions of higher education. Internet Service Providers
There are many ISP's within the region. They vary from small
mom-and-pop operations that provide local dialup services to small towns,
to mid-level service providers that offer regional services
and, in some cases, were spawned by the original NSF regional
networks, to backbone providers that have national networks spanning
the country and connecting to the Network Access Points (NAP's)
for exchanging traffic with other national networks.
ISP's usually provide connectivity as their main service, but some
also offer commodity services such as web farms, caching servers,
news servers, or mail systems. These types of services had their
origins in the higher educational community and are almost always provided
locally to users by the institutions of higher education.
ISP's are not allowed to route general traffic across the vBNS,
and hence rarely provide connectivity to the national infrastructure.
One of the reasons for the development of an Internet2 gigapop is
to aggregate traffic to the vBNS, a service unavailable from most
ISP's.
A regional network that exists in the Great Plains area is Global
Internet (recently purchased by Verio, a national provider). Global
Internet originally evolved from the NSF regional network known as
MIDnet. This network provides connectivity to several of the state
networks participating in the Great Plains and Internet2 projects,
including South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas. Global
Internet, however, does not provide the types of networks services
required by a high performance network, nor does it provide aggregation
of traffic for connecting to agency networks or other private
networks for library services.
There are eight national backbone providers that have points of
presence in the Kansas City area and which can provide connectivity
to the commodity Internet. None of these appear ready or willing
to provide high performance network services and probably will not run
the protocols necessary for such connectivity (e.g. IPv6) for many
years. Moreover, the interconnection of the national network
providers has become a major bottleneck. Traffic between the
national carriers is often limited by congestion at the NAP's and
other exchange points. One of the goals of the corporation will be
enhanced Internet1 connectivity through the use of multi-homing of
multiple commodity Internet connections.
The cost of connecting to an ISP varies greatly and is usually dependent
on the type of connection and the bandwidth.
A list of approximate costs taken from a sample of vendors in the KC
area, where local loop charges are fairly inexpensive, is as follows
(including the cost of the local loop):
Other possibilities may exist for obtaining high performance network
services, although they are unclear at this time. Major circuit
vendors who provide both layer 1 and layer 2 services on a national
scale could try to provide such services. Some of these vendors
have indicated that the future will hold such offerings, but few
have come forward with definite plans to do so. The Internet2
project must deal with many unknowns and it fundamentally
experimental in nature, making it very difficult for providers to
contract for services.
The affairs of the corporation will be managed by a Board of Directors as defined by the Bylaws of the corporation. An Executive Director reports to the Board of Directors and will manage the day to day operations of the corporation. The Board of Directors
The number of Board of Directors is equal to the number of participating
states having members in the corporation. The representative from a
particular state is chosen from among the members of the corporation
from that state.
The Bylaws of the corporation specify the election
and term of the representatives serving on the Board of Directors, including
the terms of office of the initial Directors.
The Executive Director The Executive Director will report to the Board of Directors and will be responsible for the day to day operations of the corporation. The Executive Director, as specified by the Bylaws of the corporation, shall be responsible for preparing and recommending budgets for approval by the Board of Directors. All other employees of the corporation will report to the Executive Director.
The day to day operations of the corporation will be coordinated by the Executive Director of the corporation. That person may also play a role in the technical management of the network. Technical Staff
The technical staff of the network shall consist of two people
knowledgeable in the field of IP networking and will include the Executive
Director. These two people will be responsible for the following
tasks:
The actual hiring of employees will be done through the Center for Research
at the University of Kansas. This entity can offer full benefits to all
employees. It is also the entity which oversees the existing EPSCoR/NSF.
Other Staff and Location Office space and secretarial services for the corporation will be obtained in the Kansas City area, most likely in the city of Lawrence. If possible, these services will be out-sourced from one of the member institutions. The space necessary for office services will be minimal and secretarial staff, whenever possible, should be shared with member institutions. Other Services Other services will be needed by the corporation for operation of the network. For example, physical management of the devices and collocation of equipment. These are expected to be obtained from the vendors providing circuits in the case of the KC routing node, and from the EROS Data Center in the case of the South Dakota routing node. Similarly, NOC services will be contracted for, possibly to a member institution. One of the main tasks of the technical staff shall be to coordinate all of these activities. Network Design The following diagram contains a preliminary design for the network. The assumption is that there will be two routing nodes, one in the KC region and the other at the EROS Data Center. The routing nodes will facilitate connections to the states and to both the vBNS and the commodity Internet. Expected costs of the circuits are also described in this diagram.
This business plan is to provide for a corporation, and its
associated network, for a period of time of from three to five years.
One of the goals of that initiative is to bring advanced
network services, and in particular advanced network applications, to
the Internet community. As these services and applications are developed
and become common place, they will be integrated into the fabric of the
commodity Internet.
The need for a network which provides for the types of services envisioned
by the institutions of higher education may not exist after five years,
and therefore the need to maintain the corporation and its network
should be reevaluated after this period of time. If the need continues
to exist, then the corporation can continue to run the network and to
provide advanced services for its member institutions. If not, the
corporation can be dissolved as defined by the bylaws.
The annual budget of the corporation will be recommended by the Executive Director of the corporation and approved by the Board of Directors. The initial Board of Directors will approve the first budget of the corporation. This section describes a sample budget that might be recommended to the Board of Directors. Expenses
The expenses incurred in this sample budget are organized into five
parts: the infrastructure, or those items considered central to
the operation of the network, the circuits to the states, the
connections to the vBNS for support of Internet2 activities, the
connections to Internet1 to support commodity Internet activities,
and connections to other agency Networks.
An outline of these expenses follows. This outline assumes
a singe point of presence for an affiliated network in each state.
Income
The income for the network will paid by the dues of the respective members.
In the following set of guidelines, the connections
are assumed to be as in the above diagram at DS-3 speeds.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure is divided into two categories: membership and
network costs. The membership section contains all salaries, travel
expenses, office expenses, etc. The network section includes items such as
maintenance, NOC service costs, and hardware costs. The reason for
these two categories is because the Center for Research, Inc. will
impose an administrative fee which is based on the
membership part of the infrastructure.
The infrastructure costs will be divided equally among the membership
as organized into states.
Circuit Costs
The circuit between the two routing nodes is considered infrastructure and
is paid for by the membership. This will be true even in the case where
the speed of the line is increased to OC-3. The remaining circuits are
charged to the states as follows: The costs of the DS-3
lines are averaged and split evenly between the states. If a state wishes
to have an OC-3 connection, then that state pays the difference in cost
between the OC-3 and DS-3 charges. The effect of this is that at DS-3
speeds, each state pays the average line cost, and at OC-3 speeds, each
state pays, approximately, the cost of the circuit.
Internet1 Connectivity
Each state would be charged it's percentage of the total bandwidth
connecting the network to the commodity Internet. For example, if
the equivalent of 30 T1's were to be purchased from Internet1
providers at a cost of $42,000/month (or $1,400/month per T1), and a state or affiliated network
contracted for 10 T1's, then that state would pay $14,000/month.
A state contracting for 3 T1's would pay $4,200/month.
Internet2 Connectivity
The charges for connecting to the vBNS might be will divided between
the Internet2 members having connections grants. For example, if
the Internet2 connectivity were $90,000/month, then each of the eleven
Internet2 members, assuming each had a connections grant, would pay
$8,182.82/month. The charge to an affiliated state network having two
Internet2 members would therefore be $22,500/month.
Agency Network Connectivity
This would be allocated in exactly the same way as Internet1 connectivity.
A state would pay the cost of contracting out the appropriate service at
the appropriate bandwidth.
A sample budget, using the circuit costs described above, and using
the above guidelines, is presented below. This budget assumes that
all connections, including the direct connections, are at DS-3 speeds,
except for the vBNS connection, which is assumed to be OC-3. All
costs in this budget are monthly costs.
Click Here for a sample budget
BYLAWS OF GPN
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