1.3 Disaster recovery

Ian Griffiths reported that there had been no progress with the idea of the framework agreement as there had been no take up of the proposed service.

A number of related initiatives were mentioned. LMN was running an offsite, online backup pilot with a commercial provider utilising a inter link between the provider and LMN. ClydeNet and EaStMAN had installed a connection between the two MANs, funded by e-science money. LMN was purchasing a second connection to SuperJANET for resilience. Eight universities in the East Midlands had agreed in principle to provide each other with backup facilities.

It was proposed that the MANs should produce a collective report of activities on an annual basis to be placed on the web.

Action: Mick Kahn

2. Liaison with Chairs of MANs Group

The draft terms of reference were still awaited from the Chairs of MANs Group. UKMMG will agree its revised terms of reference by email to be compatible with the Chairs of MANs Group.

Action: Mick Kahn

3. Broadband aggregation

Ian Griffiths had been unable to circulate a promised paper because a meeting had been cancelled. He reported on general developments with RABs that were now being called Adits (it was not clear if this was an acronym).

4. SuperJANET5

4.1 Connections reliability paper

Mike Whitehead had circulated a draft response to the paper on connection reliability produced by Jeremy Sharp and referred to UKMMG by the Chairs of MANs Group.

The paper was discussed in detail. It was agreed that there were political as well as technical implications that needed to be addressed to ensure that institutional expectations were met. It was recognised that top sliced funding for multiple access links to each institution was unaffordable.

The following major points were agreed:

The proposal to keep solutions within the JANET domain was agreed.

The need for multiple connections to the JANET backbone from regional networks was agreed as was the need to provide UPS power to any critical hardware

The need to ensure that the core of each regional network was resilient was agreed.

UKMMG did not consider that the provision of additional access links was the complete solution to institutional resilience. It is recommended that the JISC funds a study, involving UKERNA, the RNOs and institutions to consider the full service availability picture

Any solution involving multiple access links needed to be taken into account into the SLA and monitoring.

Mike Whitehead will produce a revised response for agreement by email.

4.2 Development Task Force

It was agreed that the UKMMG representatives on the Development Task Force would be Mick Kahn, Ed Carter, Mike Byrne and Jason Bain.

4.3 Responses to UKERNA questions

It was noted that the three UKERNA questions arising from the RUSI meeting were impossible to answer completely at this stage. Only partial responses could be provided at this stage. The MidMAN response was welcomed as an example and RNOs were encouraged to share their responses by email.

Denis Russell proposed to visit each RNO in due course to discuss SuperJANET5. He expected that this would involve people other than the UKMMG representative.

UKERNA will revive the mans-liaison email list that will contain the members of the uk-mans mailing list plus UEKRNA representatives.

6.2 Development Task Force

The UKMMG membership of the Task Force is noted above.

6.3 JANET SLA 2004/05

Steve Percival reported that both the actual days and the public holidays for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day had been included in the schedule for 2004/05. The availability targets will not change from the current year and the specific targets for future years have been removed.

6.4 RPAN contract

Steve Percival reported that the new contracts had now been sent out, with the current years schedules.

6.5 English FE upgrades

Steve Percival reported that the LSC had yet to give the formal go ahead, but that all the signs were positive.

6.6 ACL connections

Steve Percival reported that Robert Prabucki from UKERNA was visiting ACL providers and would welcome RNO participation in the visits.

6.7 Sponsored connections

Steve Percival reported that the JANET bandwidth charges would be fixed annually in advance. It was requested that this information was provided in February for the year beginning in August because of budgeting requirements. UKERNA will have a payment mechanism in place by August 2004, but measurement will not be available until at least 2005.

6.8 RNO Audit programme

UKERNA will not publish a full schedule. SWMAN and CANLMAN were audited in February and had encountered no particular problems. LMN and ClydeNet will be audited in May.

7. Dates of future meetings