30 years and a broken marriage!

Over the last few years, we have seen an insane growth of ports at this location, mostly in the higher port-speeds, up to the point where the port density of these switches was not sufficient anymore. We already announced we would be breaking up the happy marriage in 2022 as part of the migration project where we would replace all the older Extreme switches with new Juniper MX10K8, but due to global delivery issues, this got postponed until further notice. Mid 2023 we finally received all the required equipment and started with the first migrations, and while AMS- IX was preparing for its 30-year anniversary to come, a part of the team was preparing for what later will become known as “The Monster Project”, splitting up Nikhef and Digital Realty AMS9 (Former SARA).

In a normal migration project, we would migrate all the customers to one of the redundant switches, so we can safely replace the switch that is not handling traffic. After this we would just do the same trick the other way around to finalize the migration, but given the size, complexity, and the age of the “SuperSite” this straightforward approach was not possible. We came up with a new plan to first split them apart, which meant for both locations would run without redundancy at the same time. At AMS-IX we do not like losing redundancy, especially not on two locations at the same time, let alone on the two biggest locations in our network and for a longer period of time. In short, this split needed to be done fast.

Since we knew this split would happen at some point in time, we already prepared all the cabling in a way that would allow us to prepare a lot of the work ahead of time, without touching the existing network, but given the complexity of the connections between these two locations, we took extra time to document each existing connection, making sure we wouldn’t disconnect the wrong cables. At the same time, we were able to install the two new Junipers, which would soon be connected and become part of our production network.

We didn’t take a lot of time to recover, as we still had to replace the Extreme switches as well and since Nikhef was running longer on the Juniper already, we decided to migrate this location first, which started on February 12th in the early morning. Here to we experienced some delays due to the number of connections that needed to be replaced, but in the end, we succeeded in finalising the physical migration by Wednesday the 14th of February, followed by configuration work and migrating all customer traffic on February 16th, marking the end of the migrations at Nikhef and only leaving the task of load balancing traffic over the two switches.

The week after completing Nikhef we continued with the final migration of the Extreme switch at Digital Realty AMS9. Given the lower number of connections and the learnings we had from the previous work, we were able to complete all the physical work and testing the next day, February 20th, followed by configurations and migration of member traffic on February 23rd. This day is also the day of load balancing traffic at Nikhef and will be followed by the load balancing of member traffic at Digital Realty AMS9 on March 1st, marking the completion of the project!