In 2024, ESnet achieved a major milestone: 100% service availability for all 10 of our DOE Office of Science sites: Ames, Argonne, Brookhaven, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest national laboratories; Fermi, SLAC, and Thomas Jefferson national accelerator laboratories; and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. 

This marks the first time every site met this standard, surpassing ESnet’s already rigorous 99.9% uptime requirement. This achievement, which excludes planned maintenance, was made possible by the success of ESnet’s Site Resilience Program. 

Availability — the uninterrupted ability of researchers to connect to the network, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — is critical to the success of DOE scientific collaborations. Launched in 2021, the SRP assesses each site’s network resilience needs to ensure it can meet or exceed its mission requirements, and seeks to eliminate single and dual points of failure for all ESnet sites’ connections to the ESnet backbone.

In 2024, ESnet continued to expand our SRP efforts, focusing on strengthening the network resilience culture amongst our users; improving our systems for tracking, measuring, and communicating about resilience; and establishing a solid baseline against which to measure future progress.

As DOE science becomes more distributed, collaborative, and reliant on cloud resources, the need for always-on, high-performance connectivity has never been greater. The 100% availability milestone shows that ESnet can exceed these already high expectations — and sets a new benchmark for operational excellence moving forward.