10 Gigabit networking in SOV & HEX

Over the weekend of January the 7th and January the 8th we upgraded our core routers in Sovereign House and Harbour Exchange. Previously Sovereign House had a 2×1GE bonded uplink into each router, with each router having 1G of transit and 1G of peering (different peering exchange and transit provider on each router). Now we have a 10GE ring around the two routers and the core switches and lots of spare 1G and 10GE ports on the routers so we can bring additional transit and peers online easily in the future.

The router upgrade was completed almost without issue, there was a brief period in the early hours of Sunday morning with incorrect configuration for one /24 in Sovereign House and our IPv6 gateway in Sovereign House was offline for an extended period because we hadn’t configured it to advertise correctly. Aside from those issues we were able to replace each router in succession relying on the redundancy provided by the other router to seamlessly fail over between them as they were replaced.

We’re happy to report that Cambridge customers didn’t observe a 12 hour outage with our Cambridge to Sovereign House connection on Friday 6th, everything correct rerouted via Harbour Exchange resulting only in a momentary blip when the connection failed catastrophically mid afternoon. Normal redundancy was restored in the early hours of Saturday morning after a large section of fibre had been replaced.

One Response to “10 Gigabit networking in SOV & HEX”

  1. pete says:

    Customers who are interested in low latency connections to nominet may be interested in the following traces. This server is connected via a downstream switch from our core 10GE capable switches and should be representative of dedicated server performance.

    # tcptraceroute epp.nominet.org.uk
    Selected device eth0, address 93.93.128.7, port 42518 for outgoing packets
    Tracing the path to epp.nominet.org.uk (213.248.201.183) on TCP port 80 (www), 30 hops max
    1 gw0-sov.mythic-beasts.com (93.93.128.1) 0.323 ms 0.200 ms 0.206 ms
    2 fe1-3-nom-col1.nominet.org.uk (193.203.5.52) 0.532 ms 0.565 ms 0.578 ms
    3 host-213-248-206-10.nominet.org.uk (213.248.206.10) 0.666 ms 0.576 ms 0.727 ms
    4 host-213-248-206-1.nominet.org.uk (213.248.206.1) 3.169 ms 3.351 ms 3.233 ms
    5 * * *

    and this trace from a virtual dedicated server

    # tcptraceroute epp.nominet.org.uk
    traceroute to epp.nominet.org.uk (213.248.201.183), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 gw1-sov.mythic-beasts.com (93.93.129.1) 0.415 ms 0.410 ms 0.404 ms
    2 fe1-3-nom-col1.nominet.org.uk (193.203.5.52) 0.834 ms 0.987 ms 0.823 ms
    3 host-213-248-206-10.nominet.org.uk (213.248.206.10) 0.870 ms 1.049 ms 0.960 ms
    4 host-213-248-206-1.nominet.org.uk (213.248.206.1) 3.376 ms 3.476 ms 3.464 ms
    5 * * *
    6 * * *

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