Some of you may remember from our newsletter articles and social media posts that we worked with ZPE to upgrade our Out of Band network (OOB), by installing 35 Nodegrid Gate Services Routers and two Net Service Routers. ZPE wrote a case study on our OOB project: Reliable Internet Exchange Infrastructure: Building a Sustainable IXP Network for the Internet Association of Australia and an accompanying  blog post, which are both now available to read.

The upgrade of the OOB came as our existing hardware reached end of life, and we required a new system that could give us true lights-out management and enable us to keep our infrastructure reachable and under control when the inevitable bad things happen.

Like any OOB network, the new system enables remote upgrades to network switches and servers, with the ability to remotely recover from failed upgrades, configuration problems and human error; this one has just a few extras, such as a good tool set for local packet capture and troubleshooting. With dual SIM cards on board and some other wired access, we should be reachable in the darkest of moments. The easy set-up meant Aaron had it all done and dusted across all of our sites in record time, too! It’s another job well done.

We are in the process of activating a new Google Private Network Interconnect (PNI) in Melbourne. Activating the PNI will allow us to fill our Google caches from Google’s cloud location in Melbourne rather than carrying it all the way from Sydney. Our Google caches in Melbourne ingest as much as 5 Gbps of fill data during peak periods, so being able to source this data directly from Google’s cloud location in Melbourne will help significantly in ensuring our resources are used as efficiently as possible.

With a planned route server refresh to keep up with the growing traffic across our network, we’re happy to report that we’ve just received some of our new hardware. Plans are now underway to run up and deploy them across each IX. Stay tuned for further updates in our newsletter and on our social media channels.

Due to the growing demand for network capacity, we’re in the process of procuring hardware and planning the implementation of a 400Gbps backbone ring across Sydney. Backed by the Arista 7280DR3 series platform, this expanded backbone will ensure that our network has capacity to meet existing and future demand for our services across NSW-IX.

The 7280DR3 is part of the Arista 7000 Series that are purpose built for 25G, 100G and 400G systems and are designed to be of the highest performance environments. With 9.6Tbps wire speed performance and 16GB buffer, this piece of hardware supports 24 x 400G OSFP-DD or up to 96 x 100G.