Registry Technology OverviewThe
DotOrg Foundation has partnered with Registry Advantage to provide .org registry
services. The Foundation has required Registry Advantage to commit to best-in-class
service levels and facilities, staff, and resources to deliver on such commitments.
Below are key questions that address the capacity of the DotOrg Foundation - Registry
Advantage team to meet the needs of the .org TLD. The answers are provided
by Registry Advantage.
What is Registry Advantage?
Registry Advantage is the
registry services division of Register.com. Registry Advantage has existing
systems and staff in place that provide the technical infrastructure for seven ccTLDs
and for the .pro gTLD.
What facilities does Registry Advantage have in place?
Registry
Advantage has all the facilities required to successfully operate the .org TLD in
place today. A complete range of registry services (including SRS, Whois, DNS
and a web-based account management interface) is provided from Registry Advantage's
main data center in New York City. DNS services are also provided from POPs
in San Jose, California; London; UK, and Hong Kong.
In addition to these existing
facilities, in order to improve performance and reliability of the .org registry,
Registry Advantage will build out four facilities to support the .org registry.
One - tentatively planned for Japan - will provide a fully redundant suite of all
of the registry services provided at the New York City location. The other
three sites will provide only DNS service, two of which will be located in the United
States, and one in Europe.
Why are you so confident that your technology is stable,
reliable and scalable?
Because it is in place today and has been proven capable
of handling the requirements for .org. The Registry Advantage platform makes
use of state of the art technology from vendors such as Sun Microsystems, EMC and
Oracle, and builds on the combined years of experience by Registry Advantage as a
registry operator and Register.com as a registrar.
But aren't the registries you
work with quite small?
lthough the registries that Registry Advantage currently
supports do not have a large number of domain names, they have provided the registry
operator with valuable experience. Most importantly, Registry Advantage provides
the same types of services for its ccTLD clients that will be required for .org.
It operates an SRS with multiprotocol (EPP and Registry Advantage's own SRP) capabilities
today, along with Whois, DNS, account management, billing, and customer support services.
In addition, Registry Advantage knows from Register.com's experience as a registrar
and a provider of authoritative DNS service for over three million domain names,
that the operation of registry services often do not scale linearly. This understanding
was used to shape the Registry Advantage technology platform, which it has subsequently
rigorously tested in order to prove that it is capable of handling the .org top level
domain.
What do you mean you've proven your systems capable of handling .org?
Running
a gTLD with millions of domain names is not the same as running a system with a few
thousand or even several hundred thousand names. Prior to making its commitments
to the DotOrg Foundation, Registry Advantage conducted a battery of tests against
its systems to ensure that they would meet the challenge. First, Registry Advantage
loaded a full set of .org data into our database, and then tested the SRS, Whois
and DNS systems to make sure they could serve the large number of domain names.
Next, Registry Advantage simulated the most extreme conditions encountered by the
registry, such as the "add storms" that have been occurring for the past year.
This testing has given us confidence that Registry Advantage systems not only meet,
but also substantially exceed the peak capacities required by the registry.
DNS
Querries Per Second Per Pop
Registry Advantage: 18,202
Peak Requirement: 5,000
Whois
Querries Per Second Per Cluster
Registry Advantage: 815
Peak Requirement: 350
SRS
Successful Add Per Second
Registry Advantage: 182
Peak Requirement: 50
Hadn't
other applicants tested their systems?
Since many of the proposed systems are
not yet in place, it is impossible for those applicants to tell whether or not their
systems will actually be able to meet the requirements of the .org registry.
Others may claim to have tested their systems, but no other applicant has presented
their test plans, their methodologies and the assumptions that they have made in
determining the required peak loads for the registry. The DotOrg Foundation's
application for the .org registry provides a detailed explanation of Registry Advantage's
test plan and test results for the entire Internet community to review.
What about
reliability?
Registry Advantage's systems have been designed to provide unsurpassed
levels of reliability. The hardware platform makes use of some of the most
trusted names in the industry, and the software platform makes use of tools employed
in mission-critical fields such as avionics and medical informatics.
Are you willing
to back up your assertions with a strong service level agreement?
Simply put,
the service level commitments provided by Registry Advantage to the DotOrg Foundation
- and by the Foundation to ICANN - are the best in the industry. Following
is an analysis of some existing gTLDs as a representative sample of the types of
SLAs that others offer.
DNS uptime
.name
99.999%
.info
99.93%
.biz 99.999%
CNO
(VRSN) N/A
.pro
100.000%
Proposed .org 100.000%
DNS
response time (secs)
.name
N/A
.info 0.3
.biz
1.5
CNO (VRSN)
N/A
.pro
0.3
Proposed .org 0.3
DNS update time (minutes)
.name
5
.info
5
.biz
15
CNO (VRSN) N/A
.pro
15
Proposed .org
5
Whois uptime
.name
99.40%
.info 99.79%
.biz
99.95%
CNO (VRSN)
N/A
.pro
99.79%
Proposed .org 99.99%
Whois response
time (secs)
.name N/A
.info
0.8
.biz
1.5
CNO (VRSN) N/A
.pro
1.5
Proposed .org
0.8
Whois update (minutes)
.name
"near real time"
.info
N/A
.biz 15
CNO
(VRSN) N/A
.pro
15
Proposed .org 15
SRS uptime
.name 99.40%
.info
99.93%
.biz
99.90%
CNO (VRSN)
99.44%
.pro 99.87%
Proposed
.org 99.99%
SRS check response (secs)
.name
3
.info
0.4
.biz
1.5
CNO (VRSN) 3
.pro
1.5
Proposed .org
0.4
SRS write response (secs)
.name
3
.info 0.8
.biz
3
CNO (VRSN)
5
.pro 3
Proposed
.org 0.8
While other applicants have been happy to replicate
the same SLAs offered by existing registries, the DotOrg Foundation required Registry
Advantage to create new best of breed service levels that meet or exceed the best
commitments by any other applicant.