New 10 Gbps Capacity Helps LINX Cope With Surging Internet TrafficVolumes of 460 Gbps at Peak Times and the Demands of Over 330 Members,With a New Member Joining Each Week
Oct. 26, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced that the London Internet Exchange (LINX), one of the largest Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) globally, has upgraded its infrastructure adding further 10 Gbps Ethernet capacity as membership growth continues unabated, and demand for higher connectivity speeds increases.
To meet the growing demand, due to sharply rising traffic volume, LINX installed Brocade NetIron MLX series switches, along with additional Brocade BigIron RX series backbone switches. The equipment was supplied through Brocade partner, Calyx.
LINX is a not-for-profit organization owned by its network operator and Internet Service Provider members offering cost effective peering and interconnection facilities. Now in its fifteenth year of operation, LINX was founded to enable Internet traffic to be exchanged efficiently so as to reduce costs and to provide more direct routing of traffic for the membership, which now totals 330 organizations worldwide. One new member joined each week during 2008, and 31 new applications have already been received in 2009 alone, with growth coming from operators in Eastern Europe and Africa, along with those based in the Middle East. The volume of global Internet traffic handled has therefore ballooned from 116 Gbps in 2006 to 460 Gbps at peak times today with a further 210 Gbps managed on LINX’s Private Interconnect services.
Mike Hughes, LINX’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “If you add up all the edge ports where members connect to the exchange it would total 2 terabits per second of bandwidth, of which just under 25 percent is used based on today’s traffic flows.”
To provide peering services, LINX has around 675 member ports1, of which 195 are 10 Gbps or multiples of it, yet these account for around 85 percent of the connected bandwidth of the exchange.
Hughes continued: “As existing members grow and need more capacity, they surrender their existing 1 Gbps port(s) and scale up to 10 Gbps, with the slower ports then recycled for new members. Three or four years ago, 10 Gbps router ports from some manufacturers were the price of a nice house, but Brocade helped, in part, to drive the price down for the entire industry so that we’re now only buying additional capacity for the exchange at 10 Gbps speed.”
This has driven the need for LINX to upgrade its infrastructure to cope with the quantity of members wanting to connect at 10 Gbps. LINX has installed the Brocade NetIron MLX 32 and MLX-16 switches2 at its points of presence (PoPs) at Telehouse Europe’s Docklands North and East buildings, and TelecityGroup’s Sovereign House facility.
