Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of support to UK Academia to assist and enable them in using the
computation and data storage facilities delivered by the UK National Grid
Service, its partners, and afi liates.
To clarify the set of services offered by the NGS Support Center, a
service-level dei nition (SLD) has been created, similar to those written
for each of the NGS partner sites, that details the types and level of ser-
vices available. The SLD currently dei nes two sets of services, the Core
Services and the Additional Services. The currently dei ned list of core
services provided is as follows.
6.7.1
Core Services
6.7.1.1 Helpdesk
The NGS provides a helpdesk facility for users to interact with the NGS
Support Center. Users may log tickets with the helpdesk via phone
email or Web-form. All three methods are targeted to be available
24/7 with no unscheduled downtime. The telephone is targeted to be
manned 10:00 am-4:00 pm Monday to Friday excluding public holidays
and shutdowns as publicized on the NGS Web site. When not manned,
there is a voicemail system.
The helpdesk is administered by a dedicated resource but tickets may
be allocated to core NGS-funded staff or farmed out to other partner or
afi liate sites. The support center will target the response to a ticket and/
or allocate a ticket to an agent within one working day and will target to
resolve a ticket within i ve working days. However, the NGS helpdesk has
no direct control over tickets that are passed to third-party sites, thus pre-
venting an effective SLA being presented to an end user to whom the NGS
resource appears as a single entity.
The helpdesk provides executive-level reports to the NGS Technical
Board (such as number of tickets logged and average time to close tickets)
and operational/tactical level reports (such as unresolved tickets per core/
partner site) to the NGS Operations Board when requested.
6.7.1.2 Certifi cation Authority
The UK e-Science Certii cation Authority (CA) provides X.509 digital
certii cates for the UK e-Science community. The certii cates are a method
of ensuring secure access between authorized users and trusted computers
on the grid. The UK e-Science CA is the CA for Grid and e-Science activi-
t ie s i n t h e U K a nd it i s ac c r e d it e d by t h e I nt e r n at io n a l Gr id Tr u s t Fe de rat io n
(IGTF), meaning it is internationally recognized to issue certii cates to
people and computers in the UK.
The CA authenticates users through a wide network of registration
authorities (RAs). Users are initially authenticated via means of photo ID
(such as a passport photo or university card). Requests for certii cates are
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