Category: peering

Internet Peering – stuff about the Internet Exchanges that carry most of the world’s web traffic

Categories
Engineer peering

conference freebies

Sometimes when someone is making a statement you just have to sit up and take notice.  In this case LINX69 sponsors Prolabs have impressed by giving us hardware.com branded  4GB USB memory sticks.  The new bar has been set.

Coincidentally I recently did a screen on all my kids’ USB sticks checking for viruses. They produced 14 of them for scanning ranging from 128MB (virtually useless these days) to a few 500MBs.  One memory stick had a virus. Beware.

Anyway if any other vendors want an obective assessment of their marketing freebies you know where to send them:-).

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datacentre Engineer peering

Interexion talk on green datacentres at Linx66

Some interesting talks at the today’s Linx66 sessions at Goodenough College in London. Lex Coors, VP of international datacentre operator Interexion discussed the green datacentre. One of the slides that caught my attention related to best practice in how end users can keep their power consumption to a minimum.

Most of these are pretty obvious but worth reproducing here with the percentages being the potential efficiency gain:

eliminate comatose servers 10 – 25%
virtualise 25 – 30%
upgrade older equipment 10 – 20%
reduce demand for older equipment 10 – 20%
introduce greener more efficient servers 10 – 20%

If you add that lot up you potentially get more than 100% but it does give people a feel for where their efficiency savings and therefore cost savings can be made.

The original source was McKinsey and the Uptime Institute (2008).

Categories
Business internet peering

UK is becoming attractive place as an internet hub

Because the value of the British pound has dropped in recent times the UK is now becoming an attractive place for international ISP networks to connect. 

LINX in particular has seen 17  international networks join the peering group out of a total of 19 new members in the last three months.

In order to keep costs down ISPs peer with other networks.  In other words they agree to route each others’ traffic for free.  Running the LINX network obviously costs money and this is funded by the members so it isn’t a “free” service but it does play a major part in keeping down the costs to customers.

Categories
Engineer internet peering

#LINX65 notes on traffic growth

LINX CTO Mike Hughes told us that traffic across the LINX network has reached 460Gbps.  Thats up 40Gbps in the last quarter and around 60% up year on year. 

The growth is partly due to new members and whilst this isn’t a definitive statement on the growth rate of the internet it does match quite well with other sources.

In the last year the growth pas particularly come through an increase in the number of 10Gbps connections, up now to 175 ports.  The LINX team is already preparing for 100Gbps technology, the standard for which is due to be ratified next year.

linx65

The chart clearly shows the growth of the number of 10 Gig ports over the last few years.  It’s a bit grainy but clear enough. The network capacity is now north of 2Terrabits per second over 650 ports.

Categories
datacentre Engineer internet peering

LINX 65 and Telecity

First day of LINX65 produced the usual interesting mix of talks. Today included IPv6 and VoIP QoS.

The sponsor’s talk at the end was given by Rob Coupland, COO of datacentre operator, Telecity. In Europe Telecity operates in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Frankfurt. A good footprint to have.

What was interesting was the statistic he floated that the company is doubling its datacentre power capacity over the next couple of years.

I counted 26.5MW in total! They plan to sell this over the next 3 – 4 years. This is a big bet that they appear to be confident of placing based on the uptake that they are already seeing. One of the big drivers they are (unsurprisingly) seeing is content provision.

I’m not making any comment re the effect on Global Warming here seeing as we at Timico are also in the business. I guess at the scale that we are talking about though cooling efficiencies will make a huge difference.

Categories
Business internet peering

London Internet Exchange market data – from LINX64

66% of the global routing table is carried by LINX. This means an Internet Service Provider can connect their customers  to 66% of the webservers  (is websites) in the world just by hooking up to LINX  at their Docklands locations. Using Peering Exchanges like LINX allows us to cut down on expensive internet connections.

LINX has 57 of the world’s top 100 network operators as members, including 16 of the top 20. This confirms the not-for profit organisation as one of the world’s leading peering points.

In 2008 they had 13 membership cancellations of which 8 were consolidations. There are a further 6 consolidations in the pipeline. An indication of the ongoing rationalisation of the industry.

Finally I have put a pie chart together illustrating the distribution of ports at LINX in terms of 100Meg, Gig and 10Gig Ethernet. Not shown are stats that the 10Gig ports are on the rise and the 100Meg, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the rise in internet usage, in decline.

linx

Categories
Engineer internet peering

LINX64

Timico is a member of LINX, or the London Internet Exchange. Linx is a not for profit  meeting point in London where ISPs and network operators meet to peer their traffic, ie to share their connectivity with one another.

It is a sign of the pace of growth in internet related activity that membership of LINX rose  in 2008 to 308, up by around 20% from the previous year. The peak traffic carried over the LINX network is over 400Gbps which is a lot of ADSL connections.

The LINX meetings are not only good networking opportunities but a great place to keep up with developments in internet technology. This week the subject matter includes at IPv6, DNS security and SPAM. LINX64 is sponsored by Telehouse.

I’ll post any useful material as it happens.

Categories
Business internet olympics peering

Internet Usage Surges During Obama Speech

Internet usage has skyrocketed with people watching the Inauguration of new US President Barack Obama online.  At first glance it looks like even more people are watching this than went online to watch the Beijing  Olympics.

The picture below shows a snapshot of traffic over the London Access Point (LONAP) exchange.

lonap-total-day

It looks to me  from the right hand peak as if traffic has risen almost 50% over the same time yesterday. This compares with around 24% increase seen by Timico during the Olympics (see post). Fortunately Timico has the capacity to cope.

If you want to follow realtime traffic across LONAP you can check it out here.