Today’s post gives you an insight into Leaseweb’s networking department and our activities during December. As you know, we’ve had a really busy year providing reliable and high capacity data to and from the internet and across our customers, whilst managing network access and security.
On top of that, our networking team has welcomed many new colleagues. They’ve not only been busy focusing on Europe, but also our recent expansion into the US. We are building our own network in North America to strengthen our connections between Europe and the US, which will heighten the quality of our global network even further.
Like many companies at this time of year, we do not schedule any big activity or upgrade work during the holidays. Instead, we use this time to be proactive, to check that everything is operating smoothly and to order in new products. For instance, the past week we tested network capacity to guarantee there is enough demand in the future. We also ordered new networking hardware as well as assisted other departments with the renewal of any contracts ending in December. In short, we do all that is needed to be completely prepared for 2012.
It’s also really interesting to monitor the increase and decrease in traffic during the holiday period – which is often dependent on what the weather is like. If it’s sunny or snowing, we see much lower traffic due to people going out for long walks (probably to burn the calories from those tasty Christmas dinners). But if it’s raining and miserable, people don’t want to go outside. Instead they spend time online buying new products, researching information, chatting or even playing games. Ecommerce websites for instance experience a very heavy traffic load during this time, often equaling their yearly traffic in December alone, so these companies need to ensure they have enough capacity.
By testing our own capacity, we are able to prepare Leaseweb for any traffic growth during high periods of demand, while avoiding any traffic bottlenecks of traffic. For that, we need to make sure that all networking hardware such as routers and blades are bought and implemented by the end of this year and on time for 2012.
So what have we got in store for next year? Well, we are very excited to upgrade our AMS-IX peering capacity to 100 gigabit Ethernet! As 100GE is the latest standard, we are proud to be the first hosting provider in the world to implement this technology. This way, we are able to meet the ever-growing traffic demanded by our customers. We are also continuing our expansion into the US and the integration of our German network.
Make sure you keep checking back here to find out more about what the networking department is up to. In January we will be blogging about traffic usage and data trends in 2011, so watch this space! And as always, don’t forget to let us know your thoughts – leave us a comment below, or tweet us (@Leaseweb).