Meeting Venue J. Palet Martinez
Internet-Draft Consulintel, S.L.
Intended status: Informational July 3, 2017
Expires: January 4, 2018

IETF Meeting Network and Other Technical Requirements
draft-palet-ietf-meeting-network-requirements-01

Abstract

This document describe the minimum technical requirements for a facility to be able to host a successful IETF meeting. Includes also requirements for the terminal room and other technical requirements.

This documents should be used as the minimum criteria during an on-site facility survey, to ensure the fulfilment of the IETF meeting needs.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on January 4, 2018.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.


Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This document describes network, terminal room and other technical criteria for the IETF facility selection process, including some details related to the planning. All this details are required in order to accommodate the IETF meeting with technical guarantees of successful working capabilities for the attendees, as a result of previous experience and considering possible new future news in the medium term.

This document lists what needs to be evaluated and various alternative solutions, or combinations thereof, that may apply. The document shall be used in several steps of the venue/facility selection:

Only if the pre-on-site-survey seems to indicate that the facility match the IETF technical requirements, then the on-site-survey will be organized. In some cases, where several facilities are in the same venue or in a convenient distance, it may make sense to organize also on-site technical surveys for several facilities.

Experience shows that things could go wrong when there is too strict a dependence on specific people or equipment and when no alternatives are provisioned for. Consequently, contingencies are a very important consideration across all the process.

2. Facility General Technical Requirements

The facility being evaluated for hosting IETF, should comply with several generic technical requirements, which will allow an adequate installation of the network, terminal room and some other relevant technical details. The facility chosen can have a dramatic impact on the ability to deliver a quality network to attendees, so the general requirements of this section are of key importance:

3. Internet Upstream

4. Wired Network

5. Wireless Network

6. Network Services

7. Terminal Room

8. NOC and Network Monitoring

A support group or NOC, is responsible to manage the network and other technical issues, including concrete aspects such as:

To cover the issues indicated above and ensure network performance, the NOC will use common network monitoring tools:

9. Other Technical Criteria

Sufficient power strips MUST be available in the meeting rooms. Additional power strips also should be available in common gathering areas.

Attendees SHOULD be notified of power connector requirements prior to the meeting (via the IETF meeting web page and IETF-announce mailing list, possibly also via the meeting NOC web page).

The upstream provider SHOULD maintain spares of critical network components on-site.

10. Multi-property/building meetings

It should be noted that in some situations, the facility may be composed of several buildings/properties, such as a main hotel (the one with the meeting rooms) and secondary ones, or a conference center and one or several hotels.

This may imply that the technical requirements in this document shall be met by at least by the building actually hosting the meeting rooms, however a subset of the requirements may be also relevant for the main hotel or even several of them.

For example, it is desirable that the main facility is connected with a direct optic fiber to other facilities (secondary hotels). This is key in case the main facility is a conference center and there is a main hotel or several ones. This will allow probably setting up in one or several hotels the IETF-hotel SSID providing adequate bandwidth for our needs.

There are alternative solutions, such as ensuring that the hotels have sufficient bandwith even if they aren't connected to the IETF network, and the difficulty is to define strict requirements for each of the possible cases. However, the spirit of our needs in case there is not a "main hotel" being the same facility as the meeting rooms facility, should be considered by the on-site-survey team report in order to ensure a close match with our needs.

11. Technical Risks and Contingencies

TBD.

12. Timing and Planning

Typically the pre-on-site survey is done by an email questionnaire filled by the facility or even an phone/audio interview. This SHOULD take place several years (around 3) before a possible on-site survey is decided for that venue.

The on-site survey MUST take place at least 2-3 years in advance of a possible contract. Whenever possible, several facilities in that venue MAY be surveyed in a single trip.

The pre-meeting survey MUST take place 1-2 months in advance of the actual meeting, in order to confirm some technical aspects and deploy a router for some remote testing and monitoring.

13. Venue Acceptance/Rejection Report

After the on-site survey, the team responsible for that visit will provide a complete report to the IAOC meetings committee. This report will provide inputs regarding both, the venue and the visited facilities. Only those facilities that MAY qualify will be ranked by the survey team.

The report MUST include non only technical aspects but also others related to the venue-selection-process itself, from both the venue and the ranked facilities.

14. Security Considerations

This document does not have any protocol-related security considerations.

15. IANA Considerations

This document does not have any specific IANA considerations.

16. Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the inputs of Brett Thorson, Jim Martin, Joel Jaeggli, Laura Nugent and Karen Odonoghue (alphabetical order).

Author's Address

Jordi Palet Martinez Consulintel, S.L. Molino de la Navata, 75 La Navata - Galapagar, Madrid 28420 Spain EMail: jordi.palet@consulintel.es URI: http://www.consulintel.es/