DC suite

Worked remotely most of the day when I wasn't talking at the NSF. Spent most of the day working up a spreadsheet that shows all our projected wavelength demands. This is purely to meet an early deadline from Level3 for capacity planning. They'll take our demands and put them into a system that will track our capacity and provide us with the metrics we need to decide when to deploy more Infinera interfaces. Eventually this will end up in an IU-managed circuit database. We already have a weather map ready to go. The data just needs to be populated. I expect we can do that within the next few weeks.

Visited the McLean, VA suite for an acceptance walkthrough. Looked good for the most part. The bulk cable to the MAX suite on the other side of the colo area wasn't in yet, and our multifunction panel (MFP) wasn't racked up. We were fortunate to catch Level3 in the act of testing our bulk fiber to their transport area. You'll see that setup in the picture I've attached. A bit of explanation...

The Level3 transport for the new Internet2 Network, via Infinera DTCs, is not located in Internet2 suites. All that gear sits in the Level3 transport area in a totally separate part of the POP that we don't have access to. In order to rapidly provision interconnects from the I2 suite and the Internet2 Network transport gear, we have provisioned bulk cable to all of our suites. The numbers vary, but in general, it's 96 strands (46 pair) of fiber in each direction at the router nodes, and 48 strands (24 pair) in each direction at the grooming sites.

So, it was good to catch the tech today so he could tell me how the ADC panels are numbered. Looks like they ship with the ports already labeled. It's different than I was expecting, and the timing is good here since I'm going to work on fiber panel tracking tomorrow. Now I know how that FDP is labeled. Need to work on the other three vendors. :-)