Automated GOLE Pilot

[John Vollbrecht <jrv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all -

The people included in the to: header of this email have indicated they would be willing to participate in the GLIF Automated GOLE Pilot working group. If there are others who would like to be on the list please let me know.  I am acting as co-chair of the group, and would like to have one or more additional co-chair.

I would like to set up a time for a call sometime in the first half of January to discuss what we can present at the GLIF meeting the first week of February.  I have set up a doodle to find a time for the call -http://www.doodle.com/c2kmbmuvs72wz8pb  -- please indicate which times will work for you and I will set up a call.

The goal of the GLIF  automated GOLE task force is to create several automated layer 2 GOLES  by the GLIF meeting next fall.  By the February meeting we should present to GLIF plans for getting these designed and implemented.  My belief is  that the first step for this is to identify some number of exchange point providers that are willing to investigate how this would be implemented and to allocate some resources to it if it seems feasible.  This would be the potential GOLE participants.  

I propose that the participants define the requirements of Automated GOLES and help in finding applications that can use these capabilities.   The software to automate GOLES will be selected to support the requirements.   My expectation is that existing software can be modified to fit the requirements.   The working group may decide to use that same software in all locations or use different software in different locations.   My expectation is that GOLE participants and software implementers will  work together to define, implement and deploy automation capabilities of the pilot.

As described in the  pilot proposal,  it will be a layer 2 GOLE , switching VLANS between two or more Ethernet ports.  Ethernets may carry multiple VLANs each connected to a VLAN on another port.  Many of the locations hoping to implement pilot automatic GOLES carry VLANs on on both ethernet and over SONET as GFP encoded ethernet.  Configuring pilot hardware to support automatic switching over both will require engineers to understand what their hardware is able to do and possibly reconfigure parts of it to support the pilot.

The pilot will include applications that can use the capability.  The working group aims to identify applications and work with them to use the pilot.

Please comment on this outline and/ or suggest approaches to working on this.

John