New switches in A36 and more bandwidth between A36 and L105 in Berlin

In our location Berlin A36 we had Arista DCS-7050SX2-64 switches since the beginning. Those switches had 48x 10G and 6x 40G ports. This is already good, but as we liked to have more interconnect bandwidth to Berlin L105, we needed to upgrade those switches.

Berlin Internet Exchange BCIX kindly provided four Arista DCS-7280SR-48C6 switches and also some transceivers and cables! With that equipment we could now upgrade the two switches in Berlin A36 and still have two switches left for use in another location. They had front to back airflow and we needed back to front airflow in that rack. This switch model can be ordered with both airflows, so we just turned around the fans in the fan units and power supplies and now have the correct airflow now.

For the replacement we installed the new switches, connected them to the old switches and moved one peer after the other until the old switches were empty. There was a short downtime per peer, but it was minimal.

After replacing the switches we have been able to replace the 40G transceiver by 100G transceivers that are connecting the location Berlin L105. We now have 2x 100G between A36 and L105 in Berlin. This is only possible with support of BCIX, who provide the bandwidth between both locations.

Thank you to BCIX and also to all sponsors and peers to make Community-IX possible!