We are publishing a global review of all the network and systems evolutions during the second quarter of 2022.

General News

• Telehouse 2 – Leon Frot private room is now handling Telehouse 2 – Voltaire MMR customers

The end of this long run project is near, it took us about one year to build the room and migrate smoothly customers from Voltaire to Leon Frot, about 30x100G ports and 80x10G ports have been moved representing around 600G of daily peak traffic. The new balance between TH2 sites for traffic is about 2/3 in Leon Frot and 1/3 for Voltaire. Only “legacy cabling” customers, not using MMR, are still connected on the Voltaire site, which will also remain available for customers in need of full redundancy on a single site. Specific offers will be available for this need.

As a reminder, we have installed two devices with 400G interfaces at Leon Frot to offer redundancy as well.

• France-IX Lille will be launched soon

France-IX will launch a new interconnection platform next quarter in Lille. This new region, in the North of France has an impressive ecosystem, at the crossroads of the main European cities (about 250km away from Paris, London and Amsterdam, 400km to Frankfurt).

Technically speaking, two Nokia 7250 IXR Big-e are currently being deployed at CIV1 datacenter, interconnected with 100G of capacity.
As in every region, a local server stack will also be installed, composed of a monitoring probe, a global purpose hypervisor and the route server’s hypervisor, making the region resilient in case of backbone isolation.

10GE and 100GE ports will be available for customers, remote peering and layer 2 services towards Paris and other France-IX cities will be available a few weeks after the deployment, based on redundant 100G links to Paris.

• 100G waves national deployment

A tender was launched to select carriers to provide 100G waves between France-IX cities.

Having wave capacity between France-IX cities will facilitate remote peering for customers who are not yet present locally. A customer will be able to use a local existing port to activate remote peering or layer 2 services towards other cities.

• • Paris/Marseille: Additional 100G redundant waves between Paris and Marseille will be added with partners EXA INFRA and BICS;
  • Toulouse : 2x100G waves will be deployed. EXA INFRA will provide a 100G wave towards Paris and SIPARTECH will provide a 100G wave towards Marseille;
  • Lille : 2x100G waves will be deployed towards Paris core PoPs : Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2. Wave providers selected are ZAYO and IELO.

Deployment is ongoing and will be achieved beginning of Q4-2022.

• Lyon/Grenoble : Consolidating dark fiber and wave infrastructure

An RFP has been launched in order to consolidate the infrastructure in the Auvergne Rhone Alpes/Lyon region. New links (dark fibers and waves) will be deployed. After this deployment, all PoPs will be dual attached to the core infrastructure (SFR Netcenter+IN2P3) and there will be no restrictions to extend services from this region towards other cities.

• Equinix PA6 : Adding capacity from 2x400G to 2x600G

In order to address the growth of this PoP (+50% of traffic over the last 12 months), additional capacity has been added. This PoP has now 600G of redundant capacity and engineering rules to have less than 50% of load on the links are always observed.

Figures

A few figures about Q2-2022:

• New customer ports (including upgrades):
  • 10G: 17 ports
  • 100G: 9 ports
  • 400G : 0 port, we are waiting for you!

• Availability:
  • Paris: 100%
  • Lyon: 100%
  • Marseille: 99.9999%
  • Toulouse: 100%

• NOC service:

• • NOC tickets handled: 63

• Outages:
  • Route Servers outage in Marseille: we have experienced an outage on the infrastructure feeding the IRR/ROA to the route server. This led to consider all prefixes as invalid, thus they were not exported anymore. Our monitoring warned us, and we immediately took the appropriate actions. Impact did not exceed 20 minutes.
  • Isolation of Interxion MRS2 : during the troubleshooting of a backbone link connecting Interxion MRS2 to MRS1, the redundant backbone link was disconnected for about 40 seconds, resulting in an isolation of the PoP.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Nokia rollout: Equinix PA7 and Telehouse 3 PoPs will be upgraded to Nokia SR-1 devices, supporting then 400G customer interfaces;

• 400G ZR will be deployed between Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2 core PoPs to move from 1.2Tbps of capacity provided with OTN devices to 1.6Tbps. Amplifiers and boosters will be introduced when needed;

• Lyon: in order to have homogeneous platform and services, new Nokia FP5 platform will be progressively installed end of 2022, beginning 2023. 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 and @as47184 for Toulouse).

France-IX team also attended some events that have come back recently: GPF/ITW, RIPE84, EURO-IX, FRnOG, and of course, the France-IX’s 12th anniversary party! Don’t hesitate to catch up with us during the upcoming events, it’s always a pleasure to connect with the peering community!

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team