Dear peers,

We’re happy to share with you some technical news for the first quarter of 2024!

News

Standardization of our routing platform is nearing completion. In the last quarter, we conducted 3 additional migrations by incorporating new Nokia devices in Lyon and Paris, bringing the total number of Nokia routers in production to 18. Below are some details about these operations:

• Lyon: Deployment of a Nokia platform within IN2P3 and Hostelyon datacenters

New devices have been deployed at IN2P3 datacenter and Hostelyon to accommodate customers connected to the legacy Huawei/Cisco platform. Backbone capacity has been also upgraded. These migrations were completed in February and March.

Services can be seamlessly extended to other cities without limitations in these PoPs. The next steps over the upcoming quarter will involve completing this migration by moving all customers in the AURA region to the new infrastructure.

Following these significant migrations, more than 85% of the customer in the AURA region are now on the new Nokia infrastructure.

• Paris: Migration from an Extreme SLX to Nokia @Equinix PA6

Equinix PA6 PoP has experienced a significant increase in traffic over the last years, currently ranking as the second most important PoP in terms of traffic. It was deemed appropriate to introduce a Nokia platform and phase out the last remaining Extreme SLX chassis still in production.

In order to efficiently distribute the traffic across this PoP, a specific design has been adopted, incorporating two pizzaboxes supporting 800G interfaces. A initial migration in January successfully migrated half of the clients. A second maintenance scheduled for April will facilitate the migration of the remaining clients.

Backbone capacity has been also renewed by replacing nx100G links by the proven 400G DWDM ZR technology, which has already been deployed in other PoPs.

At the end of this migration, with the removal of the Extreme SLX chassis and active DWDM equipment, this PoP will be more energy-efficient.

• Launching of Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS)

MAPS is now available on the France-IX platform. With 2 dedicated and redundant 100G ports in Paris connected to Microsoft Azure network, this new service can offer a direct and optimized connectivity to Microsoft Azure cloud services. This service can be subscribed to by configuring an additional VLAN on your existing ports.

The service is reachable locally from Paris as well as from the regions (Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse).

More information here: Microsoft Azure Peering Service

• Route Servers (RS) update

A series of operations have been conducted to ensure that RS remain up-to-date at all times.

• In Lyon, as part of RS automation, the migration of RS was executed, involving the relocation of hardware. The latest release of Bird 2.14 has been deployed. Additionally, a customized automation strategy has been implemented, leveraging peeringDB and Francis3, our information system based on Netbox, while also eliminating legacy databases.

• Furthermore, there has been a complete reinstallation of RPKI Validators, including a transition to the latest version of Routinator.

Figures

A few figures about Q1-2023:

• New customer ports (including upgrades): More than 1.4Tbps of capacity connected!
  • 10G: 12 ports
  • 100G: 13 ports
  • 400G: 0 port

• Availability:
  • Lille: 100%
  • Lyon: 100%
  • Marseille: 100%
  • Paris: 99.985%
  • Toulouse: 100%

• NOC service:
  • NOC tickets handled: 57

• Outages:
  • Paris – 13&17/10/2024: Instabilities were detected on a 100G linecard on the Extreme SLX chassis at Equinix PA6 on March 13th, affecting 22 Client 100G ports. A linecard reboot restored the service. The outage lasted for 160 minutes. Four days later, similar instabilities were identified on the same linecard. In this case, a replacement of the defective linecard was performed, definitively resolving the issue. The second incident resulted in a 5-hour impact for the same ports. As previously announced in this report, this equipment will soon be shut down.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Equinix PA6 migration: 2nd half of the customers will be migrated on 11th of April from Extreme SLX to a Nokia SR devices, supporting 800G interfaces.

• AURA region: Completion of the Nokia migration with Freepro DCs.

• Automating main network pieces: MAC address changes, point to point pseudowire configuration , route server configuration.

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).

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team