We’re happy to share with you some technical news for this first quarter of 2023! We hope you will read this review with interest!

News

• Lyon: Adding more co-location housing capacity

The demand for hosting services is still high in the Lyon area. The existing hosting racks, which for some are more than 15 years old, are no longer suitable to sustain this growing activity, especially at the SFR Netcenter datacenter. Moreover, operating 600mm wide racks is difficult and sometimes risky for co-located customers. New needs for the France-IX infrastructure are also emerging, in particular with the installation of a new peering platform planned for Q2-2023.

A project has therefore been launched beginning of the year to increase this hosting space by adding several racks in the SFR Netcenter DC and one rack in the IN2P3 DC. These new spaces, with 1200mmx800mm racks, will allow easier operation of the racks and colocated clients. It will be the opportunity to install local Meet Me Rooms, based on Huber+Suhner LISA and MTP24 interconnections, eventually making it easier to manage thousands of fibers. Installation will start in April.

• Lyon/Grenoble: Consolidating dark fiber and wave infrastructure

This deployment is almost finished.

In the Lyon area, new dark fibers have been tested and validated. We are waiting for new high-end DWDM multiplexers, suitable for 400G speeds and future higher bitrates. Those filters will enable a 100GE backbone in all Lyon metro area from the beginning, and also allow for smooth and fast capacity upgrades in the long run.

The new 10GE waves between Lyon and Grenoble should be carrying traffic over the next weeks, once new devices are deployed in Grenoble area.

Those operations are planned for April.

Figures

A few figures about Q1-2023:

• New customer ports (including upgrades) Q1 2023:
  • 10G: 11 ports
  • 100G : 11 ports
  • 400G: 0 port

• Availability during Q1-2023:
  • Lille: 100%
  • Lyon: 99,9948%
  • Marseille: 100%
  • Paris: 99,993%
  • Toulouse: 100%

• NOC service Q1-2023:
  • NOC tickets handled: 64

• Outages:
  • 08/02/2023: during a router upgrade at Interxion PAR2, a linecard didn’t reboot has expected, and was swapped with a spare one. Three peers were impacted longer than the maintenance timeframe (50mins).
  • 15/03/2023: a linecard failure occurred at Telehouse 2 Voltaire PoP on a 2-linecard chassis at the beginning of the night. Six 100GE customers were impacted during 142 minutes. While replacing the defective linecard by the spare one, the other line card rebooted unexpectedly, impacting 119 customers for 6 minutes.
  • 28/03/2023: due to a fire at Maxnod datacenter (Lyon metro-area), 3 customers connected in this DC were impacted. Because of high damage caused by the fire, the DC was not able to bring any service back online. During this outage, a huge amount of BUM was detected. This behaviour was caused by static route configured by a customer towards one of the impacted members. We took the opportunity to remind the best practices to follow on a layer 2 peering LAN. Our thoughts and full support go to Maxnod team.
  • 29/03/2023: Several 100GE waves between Marseille/Lyon and Marseille/Paris were down due to fibercuts. Thanks to the resiliency of the France-IX infrastructure, especially with 100G waves available between Marseille/Toulouse and Toulouse/Paris, no impact other than higher latency was observed.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Nokia rollout: Telehouse 3 PoP will be upgraded to a Nokia SR-1 device, therefore 400G customer interfaces will be available;
• Lyon: in line with the actions described above, in order to have an homogeneous platform and services, a new Nokia platform will be progressively installed in Lyon and Grenoble. Huawei devices will be replaced in main PoPs: SFR Netcenter and IN2P3.

If you want more technical information, you can follow our large panel of twitter accounts (@as51706 for Paris, @as42064 for Marseille, @as43100 for Lyon, @as47184 for Toulouse and @as62228 for Lille).

Please also note that in order to sustain our growth and all the projects mentioned above, we are looking for a wide diversity of talents to join our tech team, ranging from operations manager to polyvalent technicians, through DevOps and NetOps. Find more informations here: Careers.

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team