Foundation Projects

The switching equipment at the MISPA Internet Exchange (IX) had become faulty and the model has reached end of life. This funding, distributed in December 2023, was to upgrade and update this equipment.

With the grant MISPA also bought 100G and 10G modules that are compatible with the new Arista switch and also meet the capacity requested by the IX members.

The new switch was installed by the MISPA team and most of the existing members have been migrated to the new switch. Due to a security configuration issue related to a situation where two of the members are using intermediate switching equipment to connect to the IX, migration of the two networks was still in progress in early 2024. We are closely collaborating with the members’ technical staff to complete the migration.

The project process took place in following order :

Purchase of Equipment
The equipment was purchased on 15 January 2024 and was delivered to the premises on 30 Jan 2024. The switch was purchased with a 3 year warranty.

Installation of Arista switch with the modules in the cabinet
As soon as the new switch was received, the installation in the cabinet started. The power and network cabling works were done by the MISPA technical team and were completed by 3 Feb 2024.

Configuration of the switch
Configuration of the new switch for the IX operation was completed by MISPA technical team and was tested and completed on 9 Feb 2024. The Arista switch was added to the MISPA-IX monitoring system.

Developing migration plan for IX infrastructure and member networks
The migration plan was developed based on close communication with the IX members to achieve minimal service interruption time. The task was completed by 9 Feb 2024.

Migration of the service from the old NEXUS 7010 switch to the new Arista switch as per the plan
The IX infrastructure servers were migrated to the new switch by 12 Feb 2024.

The migration started from 12 Feb 2024 and most of the existing member networks have been migrated to the new switch by 16 Feb 2024. A few networks have technical work to complete before migrating to the new switch and their teams are working on it.
Most of the existing members increased their port capacity from 1G to 10G or 10G to higher.

New member connections
So far there are 3 new networks connected to MISPA-IX. Two more networks are in process of connecting to the IX.

Initially, the plan was to purchase a physical server to host the IX infrastructure servers. However, the $25,000 grant was fully spent for purchasing the new switch with the necessary modules. Thus, it was necessary to delay purchase of a dedicated physical server for the IX to a future project.

As a result of the Project, MISPA were able to:

• Connect more local networks to the IX
• Increase port capacities to meet the existing members’ requirement
• Eliminate service interruptions due to faults in IX switch operation