London Internet Exchange Taps Ciena Waveserver platform for Data Center Interconnect

In its bid to provide its member organizations with improved peering services, the London Internet Exchange (LINX) has deployed Ciena’s Waveserver stackable data center interconnect (DCI) platform, connecting its data centers throughout London.

Waveserver enables LINX to support the growing traffic demands and dynamic applications of its internet content provider, service provider and wireless carrier members by quickly, reliably, and more economically turning up larger and multiple low-latency connections to its data centers.

A global leader of internet exchange points (IXP), LINX has 11 points of presences (PoPs) across London, with more than 740 members connecting more than 70 different countries. LINX offers its members cost-effective and high-capacity links between its data centers to efficiently exchange traffic between a large number of diverse international peering partners.

With Ciena’s Waveserver, LINX can provide multiple terabits of connectivity between its Harbour Exchange, Equinix LD5 and Interxion locations, enabled by the platform’s massive capacity and density—400 Gb/s of line capacity plus any mix of 10G, 40G or 100G of client Ethernet services up to 400 Gb/s, in a compact, one rack unit form factor.

LINX also benefit from the openness and programmability of Ciena’s Waveserver to design and build unique and customizable applications to evolve services based on its members’ needs.

In addition, to enable even faster turn-up of services, LINX utilized Ciena’s Emulation CloudTM, an open application development environment, to accelerate the creation and testing of new applications and also prepare for the deployment before the equipment was delivered.

“We've built a strong relationship with Ciena very quickly after successful proof-of-concept testing last year. The company has been very supportive of our project time frames and clearly understands the IXP market. Additionally, Ciena is keen to engage with the LINX membership and as capacity grows we can see many benefits for all parties,” said, Richard Petrie, Chief Technical Officer, London Internet Exchange.

“Today’s economies, governments and educational institutions depend on global connectivity for everything from collaboration to entertainment to political action, and that would not be possible without organizations like the London Internet Exchange. The services LINX offers play a huge role in today’s interconnected, on-demand era, and Waveserver provides the underpinning network, using significantly less space and power, to cost effectively service its customers and rapidly scale so that all users benefit,” explained, Keri Gilder, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA, Ciena.