SRS and IDN response

["McLaughlin, Mark" <MMcLaughlin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In response to a recent posting containing some factually incorrect
information about VeriSign's SRS availability and IDN program, the following
information will help to correct the inaccuracies:

SRS Service Availability:

1a)  Over the last 7 years, including 2001, VeriSign's resolution
constellation was available 100% of the time.  As far as the SRS is
concerned it is vital to the operation to have regular planned outage
windows to perform system upgrades, maintenance and provide additional
services.  In 2001 the SRS had an availability of 99.956 % .  Of the "36"
hours of reported outages, 229 minutes were unplanned. 

1b)  Over the course of 2001 there were 229 minutes of outages on the SRS
and in 2002 there were 21 minutes. These numbers are well within the
VeriSign SLAs.  System availability for the two year period was 99.976 % .
In May of 2004, VeriSign utilized one of it's twelve hour extended planned
outage to make a major hardware upgrade  Any outage, planned or unplanned,
takes away from the business of the registrars which is why VeriSign has
proposed that a standard (non-extended) planned outage be no more than 45
minutes long.   In addition, for all planned outages VeriSign notifies the
registrars in advance so they can plan appropriately.

1c)  Although VeriSign is held accountable to an SLA of 5 seconds by virtue
of the .net agreement, VeriSign recognizes that to run a registry the size
and value of .net response times for transactions must be much lower.
VeriSign's proposed metric in its application is  50 ms.  VeriSign has
performed and will continue to perform at a level greater than anyone is
held to today or is willing to step up to in the future.

IDN:

VeriSign launched their IDN program in November of 2000 as a testbed knowing
that the internet drafts used at the time would migrate into a final
proposed standard.  VeriSign developed tools for the conversion of those
IDNs once a final standard was published and deployed within the VeriSign
systems.  Of the one million names, not 2 million, that were registered
within the IDN testbed, less than 400 had to be deleted as characters that
were available under the internet drafts were no longer permissible within
the final standards.  The registrars for each of these registrations were
credited for the loss.

VeriSign worked to provide several resolution platforms over time as well as
worked  with the community to deploy IDNA capable applications.  With the
growing number of available tools, we see resolution numbers for IDNs
continue to grow week over week.