October has been an exciting month for DE-CIX and its customers alike. In this month of milestones, the first DE-CIX customers were successfully migrated to the Apollon platform, and the first 100G customer was connected to the new high-capacity technology of DE-CIX Apollon.
Responding to rapidly growing traffic volumes across its network, Hetzner Online AG became the first customer to connect to 100G ports on the DE-CIX Apollon platform. Hetzner Online, one of Germany’s leading web hosting providers and data center operators, is now connected to DE-CIX Apollon with two 100G ports. Hetzner first joinedDE-CIX in 2005 and, prior to its 100G connections, was connected to DE-CIX with twelve 10G ports.
Another milestone in the full DE-CIX Apollon rollout, the DE-CIX engineering team successfully migrated the first DE-CIX customers to the DE-CIX Apollon platform. This took place between October 2-8, 2013. The migration was handled by the DE-CIX network engineering and support teams, with the support of Alcatel-Lucent and Interxion. Thorough preparation in the weeks leading up to the migration ensured that each team member was prepared for the task at hand and that the migration took place with as little customer impact as possible. A week-long effort by the DE-CIX software development team allowed for a system to be put in place in which each of the customer ports was disconnected from the old switch, the fiber was moved to the new infrastructure, the customer port was put into service on the new infrastructure and the port was tested.
The first day of migration began at 1:00 am and was completed by approximately 4:20 am, in which time 76 ports were successfully migrated. A total of 94 customers and 237 ports were migrated in the first three days of customer migrations.
This is another strong step forward for DE-CIX Apollon, as DE-CIX plans for all customer ports to be migrated to the DE-CIX Apollon platform by December 2013. DE-CIX Apollon consists of four fully implemented Supernodes spread across the Frankfurt metro region, with the platform’s deployment having begun in April 2013. During the past several months, DE-CIX’s engineering team systematically implemented the ADVA Optical Networking FSP 3000 optical backbone equipment and four Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS-20 100G-capable core switches. The most recent and final stage of equipment deployment included installation and activation of the four new Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS-20 edge switches, which was completed in late summer.
