The France-IX technical team did not spare any effort despite the challenging circumstances these past few months. Check this full report for details of actions conducted during the first quarter:

General news:

•  More OTN muxponders

Following the trend of traffic growth of our Scaleway DC3 PoP, we’ve decided to upgrade its backbone technology from passive DWDM multiplexing to OTN muxponders (Infinera Groove G30). This change had already been done on many France-IX links.

Four OTN muxponders were installed, providing a total redundant capacity of 400Gbps towards each of our two core locations, Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2. More than fifty DWDM channels were replaced by four 200Gbps waves, making room for further upgrades as our OTN chassis are easily upgradable.

We also installed generation 2 switch fabrics in our Juniper EX9214 chassis, to allow insertion of higher-density 100G line-cards.

• ASN change for the Marseille Route-Servers and AS-SET reorganisation in the RIPE-db

With the growth of both Paris and Marseille LANs, we thought it would be better to separate the two platforms with two distincts ASNs, for a more future-proof numbering scheme.

AS42064 has thus been allocated to Marseille Route-Servers, as announced on the mailing-list. The change is smoothly carried out, many members have already made the change. Feel free to drop us an email when you’re ready to do so.

We also launched a new twitter account : “@as42064”, that will update you about the specific deployments and actions taking place in the South of France! Be sure to follow us if you don’t want to miss anything!

At last, getting the feedback from some members, we took the opportunity to create or update RIPE objects to better manage AS-SETs and aut-nums connected to France-IX:

Paris:

AS-FRANCEIX-PAR – AS-Set All Members

AS-FRANCEIX-PAR-LIST – AS List All Members

AS51706:AS-MEMBERS – AS-Set RouteServer-Members

AS51706:AS-MEMBERS:AS-PAR-RS – Existing : AS List RouteServer-Members

Marseille:

AS-FRANCEIX-MRS – AS-Set All Members

AS-FRANCEIX-MRS-LIST – AS List All Members

AS42064:AS-MEMBERS – AS-Set RouteServer-Members

AS42064:AS-MEMBERS:AS-MRS-RS – AS List RouteServer-Members

• Paris Core sites equipment renewal

Last September, following a 3-month tender, we selected Nokia 7750 SR-s routing platform to run France-IX LAN for the next years. We started rollout of the platform at Interxion PAR2 in November 2019, followed by Interxion MRS1 in January 2020.

We are now preparing the equipment swap at our biggest PoP, Telehouse 2, where during the next 3 months we will be replacing the two Extreme SLX9850-8 with two 7750 SR-2s, alongside with a few 7210 SAS-Sx satellites for legacy connectivity. This big change is also the opportunity for us to install, for the first time, a structured cabling architecture featuring an MTP24 backbone, allowing for very fast future equipment swaps and reduced downtime for customers.

More information will be provided as we step closer to the migration itself.

• Netmask change in Paris is still around

The netmask update campaign, from /23 to /22, will soon be 2 years old. We have still 24 members on the platform who are reachable in the /23 but not in the /22.

We started a member-per-member discussion to try to get everyone connected in the /22. In some cases, we will be forced to remove members from Route-Servers as this situation can lead to blackholing. We won’t be offering any support to members who have not made the change after the first ‘37.49.238.’ allocations are made.

• Key figures for Q1-2020

• • New customer ports (including upgrades):
    • 10G: 20 ports
    • 100G: 13 ports

Note: 1G ports have been discontinued. No 1G port will be put in service anymore. Existing 1G port will remain as-is, but we encourage members with 1G interfaces to move to 10G.

• • Availability during Q1-2020:
    • Paris: 99,988%
    • Marseille: 99,992%

• • NOC service : NOC tickets handled: 61

• • Outages:

• • • Paris:

– A member has disrupted the LAN due to a LAN loop. The LAN is protected against loops, but unexepected ACL implementation on certain routers have allowed a MAC address leak in the forwarding tables. Actions have been taken to make sure the ACLs work as intended and expected.

– A line card has rebooted on one of our routers. A case has been opened with the vendor to investigate.

• • • Marseille:

– A power outage occurred during the equipment swap due to feed overload. As new higher capacity feeds have been installed, with new power distribution units, the issue will not occur again.

• Upcoming actions and projects:

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all the staff was working from home and datacenter interventions were limited to the necessary. However, we still connected new customers thanks to our precabled equipment, and we installed new precabling whenever needed. Any emergency intervention was of course possible.

During this time, the pace of projects rollout may have slowed down a bit, but we are still working hard for the current quarter:

– Backbone upgrades : Telehouse 2 PoP will be upgraded with Nokia platform by the end of Q2-2020;

– Route-servers re-build : we will be rolling out Bird 2.0 on our route-servers, with a lot of improvements. Also, RS machines will be replaced with brand new servers.

– A new flow monitoring infrastructure is under construction and should be ready this fall.

– A new version of tools.franceix.net will be available by the end of Q2-2020