e-Net Fiber being pulled in

We decided to move the fiber from Dangan across town to Mervue and also, we're going to light our own dark fiber in Galway. It'll also more than double our bandwidth to Dublin.

The drop connection for that is finally being pulled today, pictures will follow.

The beauty of it all is, that no civils are needed, because we can pull it through existing ducting in the cable-riser of the neighbor building (owned by the same landlord). That way we're ensured, that we've got entirely different paths.

Obviously, this fiber trunk is also on a completely different fiber ring and connection to Dublin from the BT fiber, that already is in Mervue.

Cisco Catalyst

We've recently bought a couple of older Cisco Catalyst switches and replaced the Dell switches in the network.

First of all, the Cisco switches are more flexible and some of them even do Layer3 services, like BGP. So on top of the Catalyst 4006 for ExWest, we've got one of them in TeleCity and one in Mervue.

The changeover was done last week and things seem to be running pretty good. I'm just left with replacing the switches in remote sites like Abbeyknockmoy etc.

The reason for replacing the old switches is, that once in a while, when the VLan configuration is committed, the darn things just go daft and drop everything. All that is left then is to drive on site and powercycle the switch. Not something you really want to do, when the switch is 60-70 km's away.

Another switch that had to go is the Linksys Enterprise switch, because it's just a PAIN to having to find a Windows box, just to configure the Vlans. The switch's webinterface only works in IE and you can't configure Vlan's via SSH or telnet. How daft is that ?

Also our INEX Lan#2 peering are handed by the Catalyst in Dublin now. No major box needed there currently and we can upgrade as we go.

155 mbit/s link from Ballybaan to Abbeyknockmoy

The traffic volumes from Abbeyknockmoy are getting every day more difficult to cope with, without killing the latency. We're backhauling on 3 links into town now, to cope with the volume.

The fiber that is being installed by Smart will enable us with access to our own leased dark fiber from e-net, which will link Mervue to Ballybaan.

From there a licensed 7 GHz link at 30+ m on the old tower should enable us to get to Abbeyknockmoy and solve all of the bandwidth issues for a good while.

I've also got to figure out, what kind of kit we're going to use for the dark fiber. Initially our idea was CWDM gear, but that's way out of the budget currently. I've got a few other things that I'm looking at for the interim.

e-Net site survey for new fiber trunk (2/2)

The key was organised and the building surveyed.

All we have to do is to drill holes in two walls. The outside wall of our building, because when you're on the roof of our neighbor building, you are looking at exactly that wall :) Our building is one story higher. And then, once you've run the cable through the half of the building you've got to drill through the plaster-board wall, that was errected, when we moved in. That's it.

We'll just wait for them to do the job now. Might take a couple of weeks, but there's no immidiate rush.

e-Net site survey for new fiber trunk (1/2)

e-Net was around today to do the full site survey for the fiber install.

Three options are available, but we ended up with exactly, what Keith from Smart and myself had been thinking all along in the first place: the cable-riser in the neighbor building.

No civils are needed for that job, which keeps the cost down and it's going to be guaranteed seperate feeding from the BT fiber.

Unfortunatly I didn't have the key for the neighbor building today, but we'll look at it again tomorrow, when I have it.

Adding 200 mbit/s from Galway to Dublin

It looks like the next couple of months will be very exciting.

We've recently peaked 86 mbit/s on our BT circuit to TeleCity in Dublin and the Smart circuit on the other end of town is running at around 23 mbit/s. That's an aggregated traffic volume of approx. 110 mbit/s at peak.

Now, we're going to shut the Dangan circuit down, maybe keep it as backup as it doesn't cost us much, but all the traffic on that circuit is going to be moved into our datacenter in Mervue. Also with only 14 mbit/s leeway left, more bandwidth was needed.

Smart is going to supply us with 100 mbit/s L2 (in addition to the BT circuit), which we're going to combine on the Cisco switches I've just bought for our network.

On top of that, we're going to get another 100 mbit/s L2 circuit into DEG in Dublin (another datacenter), where we are moving our INEX Lan#1 connection. That way, we'll be connected to INEX in two different datacenters and will be getting the optimum redundancy out of that.

That's a total of 400 mbit/s from Galway to Dublin now, where 300 mbit/s of that are in our datacenter in Mervue.

There were a lot of reasons for not increasing the circuit with BT:
- we wanted fiber into the building on a physical different path. Smart was not even allowed to bring the fiber in through the same ducting or elevator shaft. So matter of fact, we're bringing the fiber in through a cable-riser in the neighboring building and then through a complete different wall.
- we wanted the fiber on an entirely different path from Galway to Dublin. BT's fiber is along the irish railroads, while Smart uses ESB networks fiber along the pylons and high voltage lines.
- BT only installed a STM1 capable CPE, when they supplied us with the fiber initially. If we had opted just to increase that circuit, the CPE gear would have to be replaced resulting in downtime or us hauling the traffic across town to Dangan, which isn't really an option. The reason for establishing the DC in Mervue was, that we couldn't get decent wireless links to Dangan.

These are just a few of the reasons, why.

Server Racks for Mervue

eBay is good for many things. We bought 7 full height racks on eBay. With 5 KVM's, tons of power and network cabling and a a lot of shelfes fit in the racks, this definatly was a bargain.

We made a day trip out of it, rented two Ford Transit vans and collected the racks in Dun Laoghaire ourselfes today.

Wall construction

The construction of the wall is now nearly finished.

Wall construction

The wall that splits our half of the top floor from the neighbor is being build. There's been a lot of delays for various reasons, but it's



finally happening.
Until we can start building our own walls, get the computer floors in etc., I've stacked the servers in the corner. Ah well, they'll survive.

BT handover

BT has finally, 6 weeks late in our schedule and 4 weeks late according to their maximum delivery time, handed the circuit over to us. Anyhow, this finally completes our second circuit to TeleCity and increases our bandwidth into the network drastically.

Fiber pull in

Finally, KN has arrived to pull the fiber into the ducts. Notice the difference on the vans ? Whoever screwed the signage up on the Focus should be shot.





And obviously, the manhole is full of water. That needs to be pumped out first.




Anyhow, until now the order is only 2 weeks late, so we'll see how much more it'll take before we go live.

BT has finally installed the gear for the fiber to TeleCity in Mervue. We're just waiting for the physical fiber from the road and into the datacenter now.

For the time being, the fiber will reside here and after completion of the datacenter moved into the facility itself.

Mervue basestation

The first aerials have gone up on the roof and the birds love it. It's the perfect landing spot.

Mervue datacenter

We've signed a 21 year lease for office space in Mervue Business Park. The consideration was simple, we needed a place to get our

backhaul from, that was of our own, instead of co-hosting in other facilities. Beyond that, the servers had to move from Scalp to a proper facility.
Over the next months we'll be


developing a small office here for 4 or 5 employees and a datacenter for 40 racks.