Pacific Wave Upgrades bandwidth capacity between sites
The Pacific Wave peering exchange recently increased the bandwidth capacity of its backbone segments from 10Gbps to 20Gbps. The upgraded segments include Los Angeles to Sunnyvale, Sunnyvale to Seattle, and Sunnyvale to Palo Alto. The new configuration allows Pacific Wave to support more peering traffic, increase availability of the service, and provide additional options for network-intensive research projects and events such as SuperComputing.
The capacity upgrade was done using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP 802.3ad). LACP is included in the IEEE specification as a method to control the bundling of several physical ports together to form a single logical channel. In addition to providing more capacity, LACP also offers the benefit of increased WAN availability. If a link within the bundle fails, traffic is not disrupted across the remaining links (although the available capacity is reduced). The Pacific Wave backbone is utilizing this high availability feature to provide additional WAN redundancy between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale by utilizing 10GE circuits across diverse optical topologies.
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