I’m proud to announce that we have established a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) connection to AMS-IX. The new Ethernet standard allows ten times the amount of traffic to be sent over one line compared to the previous standard of 10GE, thereby significantly improving bandwidth utilization. It’s a big technological leap forward: 100GE increases our capacity and reduces the inherent complications and potential issues associated with multiple lines. This makes it easier to scale and support growth. And not only will it offer greater flexibility, we’ll also be able to increase our capacity even faster when needed.
Leaseweb has two connections to AMS-IX. The 100GE connection replaced 8x10GE lines which made up the first. The second connection consists of 6x10GE lines, which means we currently have 160 Gbps AMS-IX capacity. However, we’re already planning on replacing the second connection with a 100GE line in 2013, which will give us 2x100GE AMS-IX capacity.
We experience half of our traffic growth for the year from September to December, so the network upgrade happened ahead these busy months. This is no coincidence of course; the summer months display a relatively low traffic growth as many people are away from work on vacation. So we used this time to make sure our network is in the best possible shape for the ‘boom period’ of traffic growth in September. After the initial prep-work was done, we tested the line for a month to check if everything was stable. Once we were sure the connection was reliable, we went live with it.
An upgrade like this doesn’t happen very often. It takes a lot of time to research and design elements, optics, protocols, etc. (and of course the technology has to be available at a reasonable price). 100GE is very new, but we haven’t wasted any time in implementing it. Leaseweb was already one of the very first members of AMS-IX connected with 10GE in 2004. Now in 2012 we are once again one of the first. The next update of this kind probably won’t happen before 2020, but of course it doesn’t stop here – we are already looking at using 100GE in our other network PoPs, in places such as Frankfurt and London. So I’m sure our next milestone won’t take long!