You will find below a summary of the technical activities that have taken place at France-IX during the second and third quarters of 2020:

General news

• High capacity optical infrastructure for the launch of Wave Circuit service

An invitation to tender was sent to four optical systems vendors, asking for a new OTN platform with enhanced density and the ability to aggregate 10Gbps ports.

We selected Nokia’s optical proposition :

• • To gain more 100Gbps OTN density, the 1830 PSI-M will be used. It features 2.4Tbps capacity in 1U with sleds having 12x100G client ports
  • Aggregating 10Gbps ports will be achieved with WLA systems, capable of bundling 10GE circuits in one OTU 100Gbps port

Equipped with these new devices, we will be shortly launching a Wave Circuit service, which main highlights will be:

• • Very fast delivery of 10Gbps and 100Gbps optical waves (grey client optics)
  • Service availability spanning all PoPs where France-IX is present in the Paris region (e.g. ITX1/2/5, PA6/7, TH2/3, DC2/3 and others via extended cross-connects – PA2/3, …).

• Nokia platform roll-out

As mentioned in previous quarterly reports, rollout of the new Nokia platform is going on in our main PoPs. Interxion PAR2 and Interxion MRS1 are already migrated since early 2020.

Our biggest PoP, Telehouse 2, was migrated this July and August, in two phases corresponding to the two chassis. 3 months of preparation were necessary to minimize the service interruption.

This big change was 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.

A few figures about this migration :

• • 249 ASN migrated
  • 243 customer ports
  • 90 backbone ports

• Route servers rebuild, new features available

Bird version 2.0 was deployed on our route-servers, with a lot of improvements:

• • Single route table optimizing Bird’s scale. Since we have 300 BGP sessions now, and 150k prefixes to announce, a per-member table was not sustainable anymore.
  • Large BGP communities are available
  • Filtering based on the “Never via Route-Servers” property of PeeringDB is now supported (https://ripe80.ripe.net/presentations/37-e-jmo-RIPE80_Never_via_route_servers_handout.pdf)

Meanwhile, some other changes were performed :

• • RS machines have been replaced with brand new servers in Paris
  • MRS Route-Servers ASN is moving from 51706 to 42064

• tools.franceix.net has a version 3

Data was re-organized for better accessibility and ease of use. Modern web technologies were used for this purpose. Don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Figures

A few figures about Q2/Q3-2020:

• New customer ports (including upgrades)

• • 10G: 42 ports
  • 100G: 10 ports

1GbE ports are not sold anymore and will be progressively phased out in the mid-term. We encourage members to upgrade their connection to 10GbE.

• Availability during Q2/Q3-2020 & NOC service

• • Paris: 100%
  • Marseille: 100%
  • NOC tickets handled: 160

• Outages
  • Paris : No outage
  • Marseille: No outage

Upcoming projects and operations

• Nokia rollout at Interxion PAR5
• Installation of a brand new Nokia chassis at Telehouse 2 “Léon Frot” featuring 400G line-cards