DECEMBER 4, 2007 -- Foundry Networks Inc. (search for Foundry Networks) today announced that the world's largest public Internet Exchange Point (IXP), the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), has selected the NetIron MLX-32 metro routers for their powerful switching capabilities to keep up with the organization's documented100% year-over-year Internet Protocol (IP) traffic growth.
With the surging growth of Internet traffic pushing overall used capacity through the 350-Gbit/sec threshold at the end of October, AMS-IX required a powerful switching platform to provide their multifaceted infrastructure with long-term scalability, simplified network management, high reliability, and protection for their long-term equipment investment.
Currently setting the record for the greatest volume of traffic for any IXP, AMS-IX connects IP networks for more than 280 Internet service providers and carriers through more than 475 ports on one distributed switch platform. The Exchange says its exponential growth rates require increasingly higher switching capacity to support the increasing trend of high-bandwidth applications like online video, competitive online gaming, and streaming audio services. Its customers' current 10-Gbit/sec port demands have increased at a rate that has outpaced AMS-IX's most optimistic expectations. A number of AMS-IX's customers will soon require more than eight parallel 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) connections to the exchange for handing network traffic to their peers.
"As we look to solve the growing demand for higher speed connections and to service our members beyond the 300-Gbit/sec milestone, we will continue to look towards Foundry Networks to answer our networking performance needs," contends Henk Steenman, chief technical officer for AMS-IX. "For years, Foundry has consistently delivered highly reliable and scalable networking solutions at an attractive price for performance. Their innovative ability to execute as promised has enabled us to architect an extremely robust, technically advanced, and high performing Internet Exchange Point," he explains.
For his part, AMS-IX chief executive officer, Job Witteman, believes that the future of Internet usage growth will continue to bring new capacity demands. "With high-definition video transfers and other high-bandwidth applications growing in popularity with consumers via the Internet, it will likely keep our growth in the 100 percent range year-over-year," he reports. "I see no reason to believe that capacity growth will be any slower than what we've experienced in the past, meaning we could be running close to an unparalleled Terabit per second by the end of 2008."
Contributing to this steady growth in traffic is the maturation of children of the digital revolution, notes Witteman. "As they embark in their professional careers, they are already accustomed to being online all the time, especially with the new Web 2.0 applications. We will potentially see traffic patterns shift to higher volumes, thus defining more critical infrastructure needs," he says.
Foundry Networks says it has enabled AMS-IX to manage steady bandwidth growth at the Exchange since its inception ten years ago. To manage the bandwidth increase at the core of the network, AMS-IX deployed the NetIron MLX-32 metro routing and switching platform to addressing the needs of capacity-intensive L2/IPv4/IPv6 networks offering a massive 3.2-Tbit/sec data capacity, scaling to 128 10-GbE ports and up to 16x10-GbE link aggregates or interswitch links at a maximum capacity of 160 Gbits/sec. According to Foundry, it radically boosts per core-link headroom as well as overall network capacity for accommodating the current Internet growth trends and growing the subscriber base.
Apart from the switching features AMS-IX utilizes, the NetIron MLX-32 also delivers a suite of advanced routing and MPLS services to address a wide range of applications. It features innovative packet scheduling and quality of service (QoS) up to 500,000 queues per system for supporting converged services, claim Foundry representatives. Combined with its hardware resiliency and hitless software failover and upgrade capabilities, it will offer AMS-IX the ideal vehicle for powering its rapid growth and expanding its broad peering service portfolio that already includes voice over IP (VoIP) peering, global GPRS roaming exchange, mobile data exchange, and multicast peering, notes Foundry.
"AMS-IX has always been a leader in applying new technologies for building and enhancing their state-of-the-art distributed Internet Exchange," adds Ahmed Abdelhalim, director of product management and marketing for Foundry's High-End and Service Provider Systems Business Unit. "As the Internet continues its fast-paced growth, and as AMS-IX continues to increase their innovative, distributed, high-availability service portfolio, we're pleased to see them adopt the NetIron MLX-32 to support these exciting trends."
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