NWAX now available at Digital Realty in Hillsboro! (and other updates)

[Eric Rosenberry]

It is my great pleasure to announce that the NWAX fabric is now available at the Digital Realty (former Telx) facility in Hillsboro!  This brings our total site count to ten!

3825 NE Aloclek Dr

Hillsboro, OR, 97124

https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/3300

As with all NWAX projects, this was a collaboration of MANY people to make this happen over quite a few years.  ;-)  Peter Helmenstine lead the charge from his side (discussions started in 2014 with Telx!) but with Derek Malkowski signing off from the Product side and Rob Chang taking care of the account management.  Matt Updenkelder from Wave Broadband (also a board member for NWAX) was instrumental in the final piece of the puzzle which was to get the Wave Broadband fiber around the Hillsboro datacenter ring.  This fiber is what finally got us unstuck on connecting the facility.

A huge thanks to Jeff Brandt for helping push this deployment over the finish line and helping with the onsite deployment at the last minute on a Friday night when the final cross connects became available.

We are really fortunate to have volunteers that are willing to travel to datacenters in order to bolster capacity/redundancy to keep things working during the COVID19 pandemic.  Getting past those biometric scanners can be a scary proposition!  (you have to take off gloves)  This is really going above and beyond!

Our President Cory Schruth wrangled the contract on this one to get us access to the facility.  Often times getting the legal bits (insurance requirements, etc...) worked through is the hardest part.  The actual deployment is the easy part!

Also a shoutout to Bill Cory, Tim Parker, and Ryan Burr from Flexential plus Tracy Ann Gill, Casey Vanderbeek, and Jim Linkous from Stack Infrastructure for helping us get the cross connects done at the adjacent sites on the ring so we could complete this ring closure (which protects ALL the Hillsboro datacenter sites).  This is a massive accomplishment on its own that is worth celebrating!  It has been our vision for quite a few years now to more fully mesh the NWAX sites rather than running a "hub and spoke" architecture.

The Digital Realty site has an Arista 7280SR2K-48C6 switch which can handle 24 x 10g, 24 x 25g, and 6x 100g ports.  We will probably reserve four of the 100g ports as "backbone" ports.

For those paying close attention, you might have noticed Digital Reality listed on the Topology diagram in the last update email.  It is now a reality as of Friday night!

PDX Version available here: http://www.nwax.net/Topology

In other news....

Since the last update, the waterfalled Arista BB1 switch is online and cutover to - thank you Brad Lough and Andrew Miller for rocking that one out!  Not only do we have a new switch there, but it is now path protected back to the EdgeConneX 7508R using wavelengths donated by Opus Interactive.

Additionally, on Saturday Andrew Miller helped me troubleshoot one of the Hillsboro ring spans (a bad patch cord + bulkhead) to deal with some reflectance issues that were causing one backbone link to periodically bounce.  He also fully re-deployed one of the older Arista 7280SE-68 switches to the vXchnge site and upgraded the backhaul to 100 gigabit back to Pittock!  This was a long day, so THANK YOU Andrew!

What is next:

• We are not done yet adding sites!  Stay tuned...
• We still need to swap the LightPoint switch to an Arista and upgrade its backhaul to 100g (waiting on some copper SFP modules to be delivered)
  
• We have not finished upgrading the BB1 to Pittock span to 100g yet.
• We have one more 100g span coming online from Flexential Aloclek to Flexential Brookwood.
• We have ordered a couple of inexpensive gigabit copper switches to replace the old Cisco 4948 currently in this role at Pittock and to add one for EdgeConneX.
• We still need to shut down the old EX4500's in Pittock Suite 108.
• We need to swap the rails on the Fujitsu T100 transport boxes as we were shipped some older stock that had incompatible size retaining screws.  (this will not require any downtime for the IX)
• We need to migrate all members off the old 7280SE-68 at EdgeConneX and on to the new 7508R chassis.  This will improve availability and get us out of the meet me room (we also need to swing the dark fiber back to Pittock to our cage instead of to the gear in the MMR).
• There are a number of new member additions on the way we are working on.  Stay tuned!

Please reach out to n...@nwax.net with any technical questions, or in...@nwax.net with any administrative questions.

And I will close with a reminder to setup bilateral peering with your key peers!  Not all of the major content sources on the IX peer with the route servers, and not all of them send the same routes to the route servers (or accept the same routes from the route servers) as they do from bilateral peers.  I would recommend working to get direct peering sessions with any peers you consider critical!  (CDN's, cloud providers, etc...)

The last several months have been a whirlwind of activity for NWAX.  THANK YOU to all the community supporters that make Oregon a great place to peer!

-Eric

NWAX Vice President

+1-503-348-3625 (cell)