In order to provide the most accurate and useful measurement results, the perfSONAR software collects and stores the following data about a perfSONAR node and the organization it belongs to:

  • Organization name and domain name

  • perfSONAR node location (site name, city, region, country and geographic coordinates)

  • Host details such as hardware specifications and characteristics of network interfaces including IP addresses and MAC addresses

  • perfSONAR software-specific parameters such as version numbers and supported features

The e-mail address of a maintainer is also requested and may optionally be provided by the user. Since this e-mail address should be used only for communication related to the operations of the specific node, it is highly recommended that a role or group e-mail address is used instead of a personal one. Any personal data entered would be of the user’s own responsibility and will by no means represent an obligation for the perfSONAR project.

Gathered data is stored in databases running on multiple distributed servers around the world referred to as the Lookup Service (LS) and operated by different partner organizations. Additional servers could be added in the future for redundancy and scalability reasons. Data is also replicated on some other services such as the Lookup Service caches. All data published is publicly available and may be copied by third-party services or reporting tools, this includes email address or names optionally entered into the registration by the user. Please keep the public nature of this data in mind when choosing to provide information.

Data is kept in the Lookup Service and cache servers for no more than 24 hours without a renewal message from the user’s perfSONAR node. A user can delete an entry at any time by removing the target information from their server or sending an explicit delete message to the Lookup Service. Data may be archived for a longer period of time by reporting servers such at those operated by ESnet (US) and GÉANT (PL/DE), but the data is not kept for more than six months in those known cases.

If you have any queries about the data stored or process by perfSONAR, please contact us.