Backbone renewal, new NOC, notice for delayed actions regarding the extension of France-IX Paris LAN from /23 to /22…and other key topics are now featured in our technical report for Q3 2019:

• Network RFP:

Last April, we launched an invitation to tender to evaluate different manufacturers, with a view of replacing parts of our network infrastructure in the short/mid-term. We compared 6 different tenders, and eventually selected the latest generation of Nokia routers : 7750 SR-2S (along with the satellite 7210 SAS-Sx).

In the first weeks of September, we installed the new equipment in our lab and thoroughly tested it against our standard test list. The aim was to ensure perfect compatibility and integration into the existing network.  This Proof of Concept was successful, thus we can now go on with real world deployments.

The first PoPs to benefit from Nokia SR-2S & SAS will be Interxion PAR2 this November and Interxion MRS1 at the very beginning of 2020. Future deployments will be spaced out over next year, and are likely to start with Interxion PAR5, followed by Telehouse 2.

The team is very excited about all the possibilities offered by those new routers : advanced automation, 100G density, ability to offer 400G in the future on the same platform …

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• NOC RFP:

 As already mentioned in the last quarterly report, our 24/7 NOC operations are carried out by Expereo (formerly Border6) for a few last weeks. They will shortly hand over to our new NOC supplier : IMS Networks.

The choice of the new supplier was done through a request for proposals, during which we compared 10 different service offers. The NOC transition will be transparent for you. Moreover, this replacement was an opportunity for us to improve the member portal and the NOC contact ways : a phone number will be shortly available to you !

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• Network freeze:

 As usual, we are freezing network configurations for a short period of time in the end of the year. This year, it will happen from 23rd of December 2019 to 5th of January 2020. The NOC will of course remain available 24/7, but new connections or upgrades will be processed before or after this period.

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• Extension of France-IX Paris peering LAN from /23 to /22:

 A matter already mentioned in various emails, QBRs, speeches during the general meeting. Our original IP prefix, 37.49.236.0/23, is now very close to exhaustion. We asked everyone to change their netmask to /22. Indeed, 37.49.236.0/22 provides 512 more IP addresses to address our growth.

We are happy to see that 82% of our members made the change. We are less happy to see that 70 members still haven’t. This change takes only a couple of minutes. If you don’t do it now, routes to the new members will be unreachable from your router. The potential effects will be, for instance but not limited to, asymmetric traffic, blackholing, etc.

We don’t want any if this to happen. That’s why we will shut down BGP IPv4 sessions of the members that would not have made the change by the end of November. Once you have made the migration, you can test if everything is working properly by pinging 37.49.239.89, that we set up specifically.

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• Key Figures :

• • Customer ports connected in the past 3 months:

– 1G: 3 ports

– 10G: 16 ports

– 100G: 4 ports

• • Availability for Q3 2019:

– Paris: 100%

– Marseille: 100%

No outages were experienced.

• • NOC tickets for Q3 2019: 86 tickets

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• Next main actions and mid/long term projects:

   – Backbone upgrade : as written above, Interxion PAR2 PoP will be upgraded with Nokia equipment in November and Interxion MRS1 PoP will follow in January 2020.