Members
ARN connects 124 institutions – universities, research centres and high schools.
Services
ARN is built on a national backbone with 10 PoPs operated by the ARN NOC.
ARN uses international links with 1.4Gbps: one with GÉANT, the Pan-European Research and Education Network, (622Mbps) which was upgraded to 2.5Gbps in May 2015, and other links for Internet commodity with commercial providers (777Mbps).
The current ARN backbone, which has been available since the first quarter of 2011, is an MPLS network with Giga Ethernet on the backbone.
All of the institutions are connected with fiber between 100Mps and 10Mbps (42 universities are at 100Mps).
The ARN backbone is an IpV6 network and will be extended with IpV6 services on the edge.
ARN is managing DNS infrastructure for the ccTLD for Algeria “.dz” (www.nic.dz).
GRID services within DZ e-Science GRID are fully operational (www.grid.arn.dz and sgw.grid.arn.dz), including certification authority DZ e-Sciene CA (ca.grid.arn.dz).
Financial model
- ARN is funded by the Ministry for Higher Education and Scientific Research.
- Connection to GÉANT is partly funded by the EC through the EUMEDCONNECT3 project.
Government support
The government funds ARN directly through funds from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
Why is ARN an example of a successful NREN?
ARN was established in 1994 and is still evolving with the increase of members’ needs. We have succeeded in developing services with ARN, for example DZ e-Science GRID infrastructure and Science Gateway for users. We are also preparing to move to cloud services.
Threats
A potential threat is the difficulty in retaining highly skilled personnel. Need to move to another organisational scheme based on a specific entity for the purpose of ARN activities.
