In July, the DE-CIX team successfully completed the project DE-CIX Frankfurt 2020, paving the way for the subsequent growth of the DE-CIX Frankfurt Internet Exchange: Two Nokia SR14s were installed at the DE-CIX FRA 2 and FRA 6 site (Interxion), both with a capacity of up to 648x 100GE access ports. In addition, our two new fully automated patch robots, Sir Patchalot and Margaret Patcher, were installed and taken live at DE-CIX FRA 2 and DE-CIX FRA 6. With the help of these two patch robots, customers can be connected or upgraded within a few minutes, without the need for the physical intervention of a technician. Such automated provisioning represents the future at high-density sites such as the Frankfurt Interxion campus, and we are now ready for up to 1000 customer ports per site and for future hardware upgrades.
The challenge: New aisles, new cooling systems, new dark fibers
To be able to install the new high density interconnection hardware, the datacenter cooling concept had to be changed severely and we had to install dedicated cooling systems. Between the data centers, we had to deploy several new dark fibers, connected to more than 20 Infinera Cloud Xpress devices introducing a new optical layer for our interconnection platform. One Infinera Cloud Xpress can handle 1.2 Tbit/s per dark fiber, and we are now ready to provide additional 20 Tbit of edge/core interconnection capacity. From mid July onwards, all new 100GE customers at DE-CIX's Interxion sites will get connected directly to the new hardware.