London Internet Exchange chooses Ciena for DCI

To provide its member organisations with better peering services, the London Internet Exchange (LINX) has deployed Ciena’s Waveserver stackable data centre interconnect (DCI) platform to connect its data centres throughout London.

LINX has 11 points of presence across London, connecting more than 740 members across more than 70 different countries. By offering its members cost-effective and high-capacity links between its data centres, a large number of international peering partners can exchange traffic more efficiently.

Waveserver enables LINX to respond to the dynamic traffic demands 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 centres.

Using Ciena’s Waveserver, LINX will provide multiple terabits of connectivity between its Harbour Exchange, Equinix LD5 and Interxion locations initially.

Waveserver now offers up to 400Gb/s of line-side capacity, which can be filled by any mix of 10G, 40G or 100G of client Ethernet services, in a compact, one-rack-unit form factor (see Ciena unveils Waveserver Ai for high-capacity DCI applications).

“The main strength of the Ciena platform is simplicity. Waveserver is compact, reliable and flexible, delivering mixed high-capacity services at a competitive price. It is a device designed for one purpose – DCI – and it does it well. Good density versus space and power,” said Bartek Raszczyk, network architect, London Internet Exchange.

Richard Petrie, chief technical officer, London Internet Exchange, added: “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.”

LINX says it will also benefit from the openness and programmability of Ciena’s Waveserver, which will allow it to design and build unique and customisable applications to evolve services for its members.

In addition, to enable even faster turn-up of services, LINX used Ciena’s Emulation Cloud, an open application development environment, to prepare for the deployment before the equipment was delivered.