ICN Infrastructure

The hardware supporting the ICN infrastructure is supplied by independent Hardware Providers, whereas ICN operators assume responsibility for deploying the software stack necessary for the provisioning of virtual machine instances. The key components involved in this process are illustrated below:

ICN Infrastructure

Hardware providers are responsible for the management and configuration of dedicated servers and the physical network, ensuring that the ICN operator can access remotely. Hardware provider’s main set of responsibilities are:

1. Physical host maintenance including firmware updates and maintenance of attached devices such as storage drives, RAM, GPUs, etc.

2. Boot configuration via PXE or iPXE for ICN operator to bootstrap the host OS.

3. Internal network configuration and management including routers, switches, and firewalls.

4. External network connectivity to the Internet and ensure reachability from outside.

ICN operators are responsible for provisioning virtual machine instances to service providers. ICN operator's tasks are:

1. Host OS bootstrapping on the dedicated servers.

2. Daemon installation.

3. Hardware specs registration into ICNP.

4. Virtual appliances provisioning and providing access to service providers.

Service providers can remotely access the VMs and manage their rented hardware. From the VMs, Service Providers are responsible for:

1. Guest OS configuration and internal host networking including clustering VMs running on different servers.

2. Services deployment and customer management.