MREN and Abilene interconnects in Chicago

Boy, how to describe this. So, in Chicago, we won't have our colocation ready at 710 North Lakeshore Drive. That means, we won't have the I2-owned Infinera DWDM metro ring turned up yet. But we will have the fiber pairs on the ring. We need to support two critical things for the members meeting:

• 10GigE interconnect between the new Chicago router and the existing Abilene Chicago router
  
• 10GigE interconnect to the MREN switch for the I2MM connectivity.
  

So, two pair of fiber can support two connections, assuming the optics can shoot the metro distance. The MREN one is easy since the MREN switch is located in 710NLSD. The Abilene one is a bit tricky. I2 owns a pair of fiber between 710NLSD and Abilene (at Qwest) for the HOPI-Abilene interconnect. So, we could glass that through 710NLSD to create a path all the way from Abilene to the new router. Unfortunately, the HOPI-Abilene interconnect is being used during Supercomputing. So, as a temporary measure, we're connecting the new router to the HOPI Force10 switch. That switch terminates the HOPI-Abilene interconnect, so we can bring up a VLAN across it. After the MM is over, we'll either leave the F10 in place, or we'll take down the HOPI-Abilene interconnect in favor of a fiber patch through 710NLSD. Eventually, in mid December, we'll get that 710NLSD colo ready and we'll turn up the Infinera ring.

Then, all these problems....go away.

The point of this posting is that I've got those interconnects at 710NLSD underway. The temporary Force10 interconnect was done yesterday and the MREN one should be done shortly. My thanks to Jake Sallee and Chris Young for their quick work here.