Migration to Juniper switches completed

What is not widely known is that the project started early 2020, with the filtering of possible suppliers. After vigorous testing and careful consideration weighing all the pros and cons, Juniper was selected as the go-to-supplier for this migration.

Then, we embarked on the trip of a lifetime and started on migrating Equinix AM5, the first of many. A lot of people were already involved in getting the Junipers integrated into our provisioning systems, we created extensive documentation with many templates as we knew we needed to repeat all the preparations many times and this would make our lives a lot easier. Everything finally started to go our way, and the plan was to complete our first migration just before our MORE-IP event in 2023.

The first migration oftentimes is the one where you learn the most. As was the migration at AM5. Now, the migration became a reality. Many of us felt the most with this migration, as was echoed now, years later, when we asked the team how they look back on the whole project and how they reflect on the first phase: migrating AM5.

Eric Nghia Nguyen-Duy, network architect at AMS-IX: “The 1st thing came to my mind for the 1st Juniper migration was the decision to delay it for 2 days to get everything ready. It was a good call at the end”

Stavros Konstantaras, senior network engineer at AMS-IX: “We write history, a brand new exciting chapter for AMS-IX !!!”

This first migration also resulted in a power saving of over 80% on this location, something that was greatly appreciated by the community. This location at the time was hosting a double set of very old, power-hungry switches and were now consolidated into a single set with a far lower power usage.

This migration also showed us the million things that could go wrong or what we could improve on, so Retrospective meetings after each of the migrations were introduced. These meetings provided the information needed to be very specific on where to put our efforts when making automation or improvements, resulting in a lot faster and more secure way of doing our work. A lesson learned which would become the new standard for many more migrations and other projects as well.

Many migrations followed, but also an incident which got stuck in our minds forever. It was the incident in November of 2023. At AMS-IX, we are dedicated to work together with our peers and with the community in creating better societies through a better internet. And what better way is there then to share your challenges and learnings with the community? Thus we presented on this incident at RIPE 87.

Shortly after this incident, another migration started. This time around, it was a lot more than “just a migration”. This was a project on its own and one to go into the books as memorable as well, to say the least. It was the migration of the SuperSite! For those that don’t know, a couple of years ago we decided that Nikhef and Sara (now DRT AMS9), would benefit of a shared network where each location would get a single switch installed and their backup paths would connect to the other side via inhouse cabling. With the migration to Juniper, we decided it was best to split this marriage up again and so this migration was basically a double migration with a split in between as well. We planned it as a “normal” migration, we executed in the timeframe of a “normal migration”, but it was far from being a “normal migration”.

You can read more about this migration and the history of our Nikhef/DRT SuperSite here, and view the presentation of Leroy de Vos, junior network engineer at AMS-IX, at MORE-IP on this migration.