Dear peers,

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

News

The standardization of our routing platform is approaching completion. In the last quarter, we conducted 2 additional migrations by incorporating new Nokia devices in Lyon and Paris, bringing the total number of Nokia routers in production to 20. Below are some details about these operations:

• Lyon: Deployment of a Nokia platform @Freepro Limonest datacenter:

A new Nokia device have been deployed at Freepro Limonest datacenter to accommodate customers connected to the legacy Huawei/Cisco platform. This migration was completed in June.

Now, services can be seamlessly extended to other cities without limitations in Lyon.

• 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. The second maintenance was performed in April to migrate 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. We also took the opportunity to install manageable PDUs on the two racks we operate in this data center.

The last Extreme SLX chassis has thus been powered off in April, making the integration of new technologies simpler now. With the removal of the Extreme SLX chassis and active DWDM devices, this PoP is now more energy-efficient.

Launching Cloud Access Service

Cloud Access is now available on the France-IX platform. Relying on 3 partners, this Cloud-on-Ramps service enables access to private cloud providers. It can be subscribed by configuring an additional VLAN on your existing ports.

The service is reachable locally from Paris and Marseille as well as from the other regions Lille, Lyon and Toulouse by using our redundant MPLS backbone infrastructure.

More information here : Cloud Access

Automating network infrastructure

The main pieces of a network automation platform have been gradually implemented over the last 6 months. We use a source of truth based on Netbox along with Nornir, NETCONF and YANG models to achieve a declarative-based automatic deployment of configurations to our devices. The first use-case is already in production with the update of MAC addresses.

To ensure data quality, we also developed a solution to monitor the deviations between our source of truth and our devices.

Several use-cases are in development such as point-to-point circuits and configuration groups management.

Route Servers (RS) update

A series of operations have been conducted to introduce new features on RS and remain up-to-date at all times. Almost all RS are running 2.14 or 2.15 bird version.

• BGP Roles are now available (RFC 9234) and routes with OTC (Only to Customer) attribute are dropped. Our route-servers are configured as “RS_Server”. If you configure roles on your end (not mandatory for the moment), your side of the session must be “RS_Client”.
• BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection) is also now available on request.
• Some of the hardware hosting RS have been replaced to improve performance.

Figures

A few figures about Q2-2024:

• New customer ports (including upgrades): More than 1.4Tbps of capacity connected!
  • 10G: 13 ports
  • 100G: 11 ports
  • 400G: 0 port
• Availability:
  • Lille: 100%
  • Lyon: 100%
  • Marseille: 100%
  • Paris: 99.92%
  • Toulouse: 100%
• NOC service:
  • NOC tickets handled: 84
• Outages:
  • Paris – 30/04/2024: Following a series of electrical maintenances at Telehouse 2 DC, one of our PDUs didn’t function as expected, causing one of our three Edge routers to reboot. After the reboot, a bug prevented the configuration from loading, resulting in 70 minutes of downtime for the 87 customers connected on this device.

Upcoming projects and operations

• DRT PAR2 backbone upgrade capacity, from 2x400Gbps to 2x600Gbps.
• Equinix PA7: Replacement of a legacy Juniper edge device by a Nokia 7750.
• Marseille: Introduction of P router.

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