On Tuesday evening, 1st September 2009, Cork Neutral Internet Exchange went live with its first peering members – East Cork Broadband and Smart Telecom.
CNIX is a neutral not-for-profit Internet Exchange point based in Cork, Ireland to facilitate traffic interchange (“peering”) between its members.
CIX today launched its new offering – Virtual Servers provided by Titan Technology Solutions. This new service is fantastic value for money. The service offering starts with 512 Mhz processor and 256 MB RAM with pricing starting at €12.00 per month.
BT duct into CIX
At 6:00pm on 13th July 2009, a groundwork’s crew began installing a new dual duct into CIX for BT. Asphalt was re-laid at 1:00am on 14th July and the junction manhole was completed later the same day.
We are expecting active BT circuits over their own fibre to be available for our customers in early September 2009. BT are an important addition to the connectivity at CIX because they can offer end to end backhaul to Dublin from Cork.
At 12h00 on 21st July the BT fibre was pulled into CIX and terminated in its rack in the CIX Meet Me Area.
On Sunday 12th July the Smart Telecom fibre connection to CIX was changed from the Metro Ring onto its LLU Cork fibre ring. The LLU fibre ring only goes to telephone exchanges, government buildings and data centres.
This move has improved and increased CIX’s resillience and connectivity which in turn will improve CIX’s services to its Mesh bandwidth customers.
East Cork Broadband offer wireless broadband connectivity in the greater Aghada, Midleton, Dungourney and Clonmult areas. It was planned that a licenced link from CIX would start supplying bandwidth from CIX to East Cork Broadband on 18th July 2009.
Disaster struck on Monday evening at around 6:00pm on the 6th of July when connectivity from their existing bandwidth supplier ceased due to equipment failure. By coincidence, Malcolm Stead, the CEO of ECB, was standing in the network operations centre (NOC) at CIX, discussing the upcoming migration, when his phone went into meltdown from customers reporting loss of service.
A temporary route was built to his recently installed but untested radio link from CIX. Within fifteen minutes of the outage, bandwidth was again flowing to ECB.
The underlying outage lasted until just after 9:00pm at which time ECB went back to their regular supplier. On the following Saturday, the 11th July, ECB began taking their permanent feed from CIX, one week ahead of schedule.
Malcolm’s quote of the evening was “There is nothing like an outage to get the creative mind moving”.
These photographs show our cold aisle containment system. Cold aisle containment prevents cold air mixing with warm air. This improves the efficiency of the air conditioning system.
Our customer racks are laid out in 40 rack aisles.
This photograph shows a roof detail for the cold aisle containment system.
The meet me area contains the patching racks and the telecoms infrastructure equipment.
These are the sliding lockable doors that protect the Meet-Me area.
Customers have requested a number of options for power delivered to their cabs recently. Our first blade server required twin three phase connections. The two cream cables are the existing single phase connections to power the rest of the rack and the two black cables are the three phase connections for the blade chassis. This HP chassis takes 2.5kW of power.
One customer asked for remotely switchable and metered power distribution units to be insatalled in their racks. They can measure power and power cycle servers remotely using these PDUs
Many customers are installing -48V supplies in their racks for telecommunications equipment. We are currently invetigating the possibility of installing a common -48V service within our building so that customers do not have to install their own on a cab by cab basis. This is a dual PSU configuration. Notice that the actual voltage is -54.5V rather that -48V. Confusing isn’t it?
In this example the customer uses a static switch to power the -48V supply from both A and B power.
As CIX ramps up, we are now adding more than one customer per week. For example, we spent this weekend migrating 10 x 1U HP servers, associated switches and NAS into a half rack space in our data centre. The photographs below show the front and rear of the installation.
Power consumption for this configuration is 2.5kW. These servers are configured to offer fully redundant firewall, virus and spam filtering for up to 100,000 emails per hour.
It is easy to get the front of the servers looking tidy.
Making the rear look neat is a little more difficult.
Early this morning this mail filtering system went live without a hitch.
Over the next two weeks we will be migrating a six rack customer into CIX. This is our largest project to date. The installation involves more than 1,000 cable connections in our infrastructure database and on completion these six racks will consume a total of 26kW of power and will require more than 100MBits/second of connectivity.
Busy times!
I came to Interop this week to check out some of the latest technologies in the Data Center space. It was interesting to see APC’s Hot Aisle Containment kit (see below).
I was particularly interested in it because in CIX we have decided to go with containing the cold aisle instead of the hot aisle.
I spoke to one of the APC guys and asked why they decided to contain the hot aisle. He said it is more efficient for their equipment because they have the have the air handling units in-rack. Air handling units work more efficiently the warmer the air they get so it makes sense for APC to contain the warm air, direct it to the air handling units and benefit from the efficiencies.
In our case our air handling units are in room as opposed to being in rack so it makes sense for us to contain the cold aisle and vent the hot air to the room so we can benefit from the efficiencies of our air handling units taking in warmer air and we also get free cooling from Cork’s ambient temperature of 10C!
There was a major power cut on the northside of Cork city yesterday. According to ESB Networks the problem occurred when a digger cut through a cable at 12:06 yesterday afternoon. 2,500 homes in the area were affected and power was restored at 13:02.
CIX was completely unaffected by the power cut because as soon as the power dropped, CIX’s UPS’s and batteries automatically took over running the facility. Within 15 seconds the diesel generator had come on line and commenced powering the data centre.
We run scheduled tests on the diesel generator every weekend where we simulate outages and log the results but there is nothing like an actual unplanned outage to really test your system.
