With more bandwidth-hungry applications such as streaming TV, gaming, IoT, 5G, and VR/AR it is no surprise that we continue to see a great increase of Internet traffic around the world. Not to forget the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put even more demand on the IXPs as they are part of the critical network infrastructure. Figure 1 shows also that there continues to be an opportunity for growth in the number of connected internet users, especially in China and India.
Figure 1: Internet Usage – Top 20 countries
Cost per port is a key consideration for customers looking to migrate from 10 GbE to 100 GbE. Ultra-high-density ports with the right mix of technologies (e.g. VPLS and EVPN-VXLAN) provide significant savings in power and cooling costs. This allows peering at 100 GbE speeds from IXPs to their customers as well as cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure.
I recently discovered the latest 2019 report from the European Internet Exchange Association.
Euro-IX gathers 71 IXPs from around the world. It was formed in May 2001 in Amsterdam and operates under the responsibility of a non-profit association with the intention to develop, strengthen and improve the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) community. A number of IXPs recognized a need to combine their resources in order to coordinate technical standards, develop common procedures, share and publish statistics and other useful information.
In fact, our Distinguished Systems Engineer Mikael Holmberg is a member of Forum Program Committee at the Euro IX association, driving the agenda, developing the technical program, and implementing it onsite at the Forums and functions as session chair and moderator.
Figure 2 shows the history of average aggregated peak traffic at internet exchange points. Lots more details can be found in the report.
Figure 2: Maximum Aggregated Global Traffic Statistics
A great overview of the number of IXPs in Europe with their aggregated peak traffic per year can be found here:
Extreme Networks with its carrier-grade ExtremeRouting and ExtremeSwitching product lines has a sizeable footprint around the globe with Internet Exchange Providers (IXPs).
Figure 3: Extreme Networks solutions for IXPs
Earlier in the year, we introduced our new flagship, fixed-form factor SLX 9740 with up to 80 x 100 GBit/s port connectivity for the most demanding IXP and service provider networks in the world. More details can be found in this blog, where I covered our public launch at NANOG 78 in San Francisco.
Enterprises expand from on-premise, private and hybrid cloud to full multi-cloud architectures and need Border Routers when connecting to Service Provider networks, with these key benefits:
Dan DeBacker talks in his recorded session ‘Service Provider Solutions’ in a lot more details about various service provider use cases and presents which products fit specific customer needs.
Extreme Networks Integrated Application Hosting – enabled by the advanced feature license for the ExtremeRouting SLX 9740 – delivers a new approach to network monitoring and troubleshooting with an innovative 10 Gbps internal analytics path that is unique in the networking industry.
This highly flexible capability enables required data to be extracted from the network, viewed directly via analytics and monitoring tools or stored and optimized on-device for cost-effective delivery off-device to cloud-scale management, operational intelligence, and automation systems for additional analysis, action, or archiving.
According to Euro-IX, Extreme Networks has a 20% market share with European IXPs by the number of switches in use (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Number of Switches in use in 2018/2019
Here is another breakdown of aggregated traffic in 2019 in Gbps for the European region.
Figure 5: Countries with the most IXP traffic in Europe in 2019
More recent data – heavily influenced by changing traffic patterns due to the pandemic crisis – that have been provided by various IXPs around the world, show even more dramatic increases in IP traffic.
