Over the last 9 months AMS-IX has been working to migrate all customers connected to the Nikhef switches to new MLX and Glimmerglass hardware. The migration has been done is several steps starting in Februari to minimize customer impact and was completed by the final step of moving customers two weeks ago. Now after cleaning up over a 1000 old fibers the complete project has finished.
In the old setup at Nikhef 10GE customers were connected to older lc pxc's and two pairs of MLX16's. All 10GE customers have been moved to a mpo pxc's and two pairs of mlx32's, which gives this pop more than enough space to grow in the future. All 1GE customers have been moved from BigIron 15000's to a single MLX8, which also has a higher port density and is configured as a PE in the AMS-IX VPLS platform.
Next to the increase in ports and new MLX hardware Nikhef is also the first pop where the new Brocade 8*10GE blades are being used in combination with new highspeed switchfabric modules. These new blades double the port density on a MLX32 chassis to 256 10GE ports, which makes Nikhef ready for many more customer ports.
The new 8*10GE blades are using sfp+ formfactor optics. At this time there are no DWDM optics available in this formfactor. Until this migration AMS-IX has been using passive DWDM muxes for the backbone connections, since DWDM optics are not available we needed to implement a different solution for the backbone connections. At Nikhef AMS-IX has therefore also started to use active DWDM equipment from MRV, which doesn't require DWDM optics in the MLX switches and doubles the backbone capacity by multiplexing 16 channels into one metro fiber. With all the new MRV equipment the total Nikhef backbone capacity has grown to 1,320Tbit/s.