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C17. Technical plan for performing the Registry Function. This should present a comprehensive technical plan for performing the Registry Function. In addition to providing basic information concerning the proposed technical solution (with appropriate diagrams), this section offers the applicant an opportunity to demonstrate that it has carefully analyzed the technical requirements for performing the Registry Function. Factors that should be addressed in the technical plan include: RegisterOrg is committed to providing the highest possible levels of stability, security and performance, both during the transition period and in the ongoing operation of the .org registry. The registry infrastructure has been designed by combining state of the art hardware with sophisticated software and proven operational practices. These technical systems and facilities ensure the high levels of reliability, functionality, and performance required to provide the quality of service demanded by registrars, registrants, and the Internet community in general. Registry Advantage? experience and resources assure that it can also provide the s stability and readiness required by the challenging transition process. Reliability Core hardware selected to provide high mean time between failures (MTBF). Significant redundancy throughout the infrastructure guarantees no single point of failure. Many failure modes are diagnosed and corrected for automatically with no human intervention.

Readiness

Registry Advantage has a proven track record, with uptimes exceeding 99.99% for all services. The Registry has an operational global registry infrastructure in place today. Registry Advantage currently provides multi-

protocol access to its shared registry system. Key personnel in place now. Registry Advantage has proven experience performing the migration of TLD names to its infrastructure.

Stability

Performance

[Link] is profitable and stable, with over $200 million in cash and marketable securities. High performance hardware and software has been selected. Measured operational capacity of all systems substantially exceeds projected peak loads.

Functionality

Performance is sustained even in the event of component failure. Registry Advantage SRS currently supports EPP. DNS and Whois services comply with all relevant RFCs. Registrar Account Management Interface offers significantly enhanced functionality and reporting compared to VeriSign? registrar tool. s

Today, the .org TLD contains over 2.7 million second-level domain names, and ICANN has indicated that its first priority is preserving a stable, well-functioning .org registry. This requirement is further complicated by the need to ensure a smooth transition between registry operators by January 1, 2003, and to provide

multiprotocol access to the Shared Registry System. The operational requirements of the .org registry are complicated by the need for a smooth transition between VeriSign and the new registry operator. This transition must be accomplished with minimal disruption to the registry? operations (including zero s downtime for critical subsystems such as DNS) and with no data loss. To reliably achieve these goals, a strong theoretical registry design is not sufficient; instead, the successful applicant must demonstrate realworld experience, with a proven capacity to both operate a large registry and complete a complicated migration. Registry Advantage is an experienced registry operator, and has the systems, facilities and personnel in place today to operate a stable, well-functioning .org registry. Registry Advantage has built upon [Link]? s experience as one of the world? largest providers of DNS services by creating a high-performance DNS s server specifically optimized for registry operations. This software is tightly coupled to Whois, SRS and account management systems that currently provide registry services to a number of functioning ccTLDs. In addition, Registry Advantage has formulated a clear, methodological transition plan for the .org registry with established and verifiable milestones. As described in C18.6, this transition plan is based on Registry Advantage? unique experience of performing migrations of entire top level domain name registries from s existing operators to its own infrastructure. Registry Advantage? systems have been proven capable of supporting the .org registry. As described in s C17.10 and attached in Section XI, Test Results, Registry Advantage has conducted extensive testing of its systems to demonstrate that they have the capacity, performance, and reliability required by the .org TLD. These same tests demonstrate the capability to rapidly and successfully migrate the entire .org data set to its own systems. This parallels Registry Advantage? results transitioning ccTLD registry operations, in which s all data was migrated with zero downtime and zero data loss. Finally, RegisterOrg and Registry Advantage are committed to providing the world? best registry. This s commitment is not a promise backed only by words. As described in C28, Registry Advantage has sufficient confidence to offer service-level commitments that are simply the best in the industry, meeting or exceeding the highest service-level metrics offered by any TLD registry operator today. Similarly, Registry Advantage is prepared to make financial commitments to ICANN associated with achieving each major milestone in the transition process

C17.1 General description of proposed facilities and systems. Address all locations of systems. Provide diagrams of all of the systems operating at each location. Address the specific types of systems being used, their capacity, and their interoperability, general availability, and level of security. Describe buildings, hardware, software systems, environmental equipment, Internet connectivity, etc. The Registry Advantage facilities and systems are described in detail throughout C17, but are summarized in the remainder of 17.1. All major elements of the registry infrastructure are operational today. Upon the award of the .org registry to RegisterOrg, Registry Advantage will also deploy services at four additional locations. No single point of failure exists throughout the registry infrastructure, and multiple layers of redundancy ensure that even in the event of multiple components failing simultaneously, the system will continue to function normally. This approach allows Registry Advantage to deliver levels of reliability normally associated with mission-critical applications such as core telephone networks and trading floor environments. Locations of Facilities Registry Advantage will provide services from eight geographically dispersed facilities worldwide. Four of these facilities are operational today. The registry architecture includes two general types of facilities: ? subscription?and ? publication? The ? . subscription?facilities, which are provided at two locations, support registration services (including the SRS and the registrar? Account Management Interface) as well as Whois s and DNS services. The other six locations provide a read-only ? publication?interface to registry data using the DNS protocol. In order to provide a highly reliable registry infrastructure, Registry Advantage will operate core registration services in two locations. Each of these locations will provide Shared Registry System (SRS), database operations, account management, DNS and Whois services. One of the two locations is currently operational at an AT&T data center located at 811 Tenth Avenue in New York City. For the purposes of this document, this location is referred to as the ? primary site? Registry Advantage will also duplicate the core registry . functions at a ? secondary site?in Asia, which will be built out and deployed upon award of the registry to RegisterOrg. Registry Advantage has selected the Tokyo, Japan region as a likely location for the secondary site, although the final location will be determined after the selection of the successor registry operator. In the event of a failure at the primary site, or other unforeseen circumstances, core registry functions will be transferred from the primary site to the secondary site. Only one site will host the core registry functions at

any given point in time. In addition to the primary and secondary sites, Registry Advantage currently operates DNS services at the following facilities:

MFN ([Link]) facilities at 6-7 Harbor Exchange in London, U.K.; MFN ([Link]) facilities at 150 South First Street in San Jose, CA; and Diyixian Internet Centre at 168 Yeung Uk Road in Hong Kong.

Further information about each of these facilities is attached in Section XI, Data Centers. Additional DNS facilities will be built out in the event that RegisterOrg is selected. Although the final locations of these facilities will also be determined in the future, the intent is to locate one in each of the following areas:

Central region of the United States of America

Europe United States of America (location to be determined)

Facilities will be selected with the intent of maximizing network diversity and performance. Typically, facilities will be located at or near major internet exchange points. Building Security, Environment and Connectivity All Registry Advantage data center locations are subject to a rigorous set of requirements relating to security, physical plant, network connectivity, and policies and procedures. These requirements include: Physical Security 24/7 Guard Service Continuous monitoring of data center areas Positive identification required of all persons accessing data center floor Physical barriers separating data center floor from publicly-accessible areas Environmental Equipment Fire suppression system throughout the building HVAC units to control temperature and humidity All hardware attached to uninterruptible power supplies Backup power provided by on-site electrical generator Resistant to natural disasters Network Connectivity Multiple high speed (45+ Mbps) network egress paths Presence of multiple carriers Minimum connection requirements for Registry Advantage routers: Primary and secondary sites: 100 Mbps DNS POPs: 10 Mbps

Availability of BGP peering session Policies and Procedures In the event the data center hosts any ICANN accredited registrar or other gTLD registries, the systems will be physically and distinctly separated from each other. Will allow personnel officially designated by the registry to inspect the facilities in which the registry? s data center is maintained at any time upon reasonable notice. Capacities of Systems Registry Advantage has designed its systems to ensure maximum reliability, performance and security for the .org registry. Its existing database and registry systems already support over five million domain names and can process at least one hundred thousand new registrations per day. Registry Advantage has built systems that can support a peak registration capacity of over 200 new registrations per second and up to 1000 check queries per second. These current levels are five times (5x) the expected maximum ? storm?peaks based add on analysis of publicly available data. (See section C17.10 for details.) Furthermore, RegisterOrg is prepared to commit to service level agreements that meet or exceed the ? best-ofbreed?based on an analysis of the SLAs in place for all of the major gTLDs. Availability for DNS will be meet 100% uptime, while Whois and SRS will meet or exceed an uptime of 99.99% (see C17.13 and C28 for definitions and details). Registry Advantage, on behalf of RegisterOrg, has engineered its systems to meet or exceed those guaranteed service levels. Systems Overview The transactional hub of the Registry Advantage infrastructure is an Oracle database running on a Sun Enterprise 6500 server. Storage for the database is provided by an EMC Symmetrix 8530 storage array. McData Sphereon 3016 (ES-16) FC/FA fibre channel switches provide connectivity between the database and its storage, as well as to a Spectra Logic AIT3 tape backup library. Additionally, network-attached storage for front-end servers is provided by a Network Appliance storage array.

Front-end registry functions such as Shared Registry Service, DNS, and Whois run in a Linux environment on clusters of IBM X330 1U servers. Requests are load-balanced among the hosts in these clusters by Big-IP load balancers from F5 Networks and with the load balancing features of Extreme Networks Summit Ethernet switches. Additional network components include Cisco routers and switches, and Netscreen firewalls. This baseline infrastructure is deployed at Registry Advantage? secondary site in Asia, as shown below. s

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