C28. Describe the technical performance (including quality-of-service commitments) you propose to make. See <http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/name/registry-agmt-appd-29jun01.htm> for an example. The successor operator will be expected to meet the Cross-Network Nameserver Performance Requirements set forth in section 2.1 of the document at the above URL.

The DotOrg Foundation’s subcontractor Registry Advantage commits to quality of service levels that meet or exceed the best-of-breed Service Level Agreement’s of the existing gTLDs. Registry Advantage will achieve DNS updates within 5 minutes, DNS uptime of 100%, and DNS responses of <300ms, Whois responses of <800ms and SRS checks of <400ms.

The DotOrg Foundation has analyzed the Service Level Agreements in place for the existing gTLDs to determine the best-of-breed service levels for DNS, Whois and SRS performance and reliability. The following table summarizes the Service Level Agreements in place for .name, .info, .biz, .pro and the existing .com/.net/.org registry run by VeriSign to discern the best-of-breed levels.

Figure C28.1 Best of Breed Service Levels

Due to the importance placed on the reliability and stability of the .org registry, the DotOrg Foundation commits to service levels that meet or exceed the best-of-breed Service Level Agreements for the existing gTLDs, as shown above. As described in Question C17.10, Registry Advantage, as sub-contractor to the DotOrg Foundation, has the systems in place to meet or exceed these Service Level Agreement guarantees on the Foundation’s behalf.

In addition to setting the highest hurdle rates for service levels in the industry, the DotOrg Foundation has also sought to define the strictest service metrics in the industry, as described in C17.13:

The quality of service definitions above assume that the measurement is being made from the same network as the measured service.  In order to measure the responsiveness of .org registry services from various portions of the Internet, Registry Advantage will contract with a service measurement company such as Keynote [4] or Service Metrics [5] to provide data regarding the performance of core .org registry functions.

Registry Advantage will provide DNS service for the .org TLD that end-users throughout the Internet rely on extensively and without which routine Internet functions relating to .org domains will not be possible.  Registry Advantage will devote significant resources to ensure that its DNS service is extremely reliable (see C17.4, C17.5 and Attachment N).  By employing redundancy at every level of its design, including the deployment of a parallel DNS infrastructure running BIND, Registry Advantage is able to commit to a 100% Service Level Agreement uptime for the DNS service. The uptime of any individual DNS cluster will be guaranteed to be at least 99.95% during any month-long interval.

The global Registry Advantage DNS constellation is designed to minimize network latency regardless of the origin of the query.  In order to measure the cross-network performance of the DNS constellation for .org, ICANN has proposed the CNNP tests described in Appendix D of the model registry agreement.  DotOrg Foundation and Registry Advantage are fully prepared to meet ICANN’s CNNP testing requirements.

The .org Whois and shared registry services are other important public resources and Registry Advantage will engineer its systems to provide significant redundancy and ensure high availability.  The advanced design of these systems allows Registry Advantage to guarantee a 99.99% uptime for both Whois and shared registry services.

In order to perform periodic maintenance, Registry Advantage will also schedule maintenance windows for two hours each week.  Although this weekly maintenance window will exist, Registry Advantage recognizes that any downtime can be extremely disruptive to both registrars and end-users, so maintenance windows will only be used under the following circumstances:

1. Registrars will be notified at least 72 hours prior to the maintenance window

2. No more than 10 maintenance windows will be used during any year

Shared registry service or Whois downtime during maintenance windows will not be considered in evaluating the uptime guarantees described earlier in this section.  Due to its critical nature, there will be no scheduled downtime windows for DNS service. 

Additionally, for periodic major upgrades to the system, Registry Advantage will be permitted to include up to two extended outages per year. These outages may be up to six hours in duration and must be announced to registrars at least 15 days in advance.