Current National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Europe provide connectivity services to their customers: the research and education community. Traditionally these services have been delivered on a manual basis, although some efforts towards automating the service setup and operation have been initiated. At the same time, more focus is being put in the ability of the community to control some characteristics of these connectivity services, so that users can change some of the service characteristics without having to renegotiate with the service provider.The MANTYCHORE project wants to consolidate this trend and allow the NRENs to provide a complete, flexible IP network service that allows research communities to create an IP network under their control, where they can configure: i) layer 1 -optical- ii) layer 2 - Ethernet and MPLS- and iii) layer 3 -IP addressing, internal routing, peering, firewalls- . To achieve its goals, MANTYCHORE FP7 will integrate and improve the tools developed by the past, privately funded MANTICORE projects and related initiatives (IaaS Framework efforts), and produce a robust and extensible software to operate and use the IP network service.MANTYCHORE will carry out pre-operational deployments of the IP network service at two NRENS: HEAnet and NORDUnet. Initially three communities of researchers will benefit from this service: the Nordic Health Data Network, the British Advance High Quality Media Services and the Irish Grid effort. Part of the project effort will be dedicated to consolidate and enhance the community of providers (NRENs but also commercial) and users of the IP network service. Finally, the JRAs will research two important topics to improve the IP network service: i) an infrastructure resource marketplace, to further automate the negotiation of the resources that comprise the IP network; and ii) the use of renewable energy sources to power e-Infrastructures, so that they can become carbon neutral.