DE-CIX, the Internet exchange located in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), hit a new data throughput record last week as Internet traffic across its switching fabric exceeded the 2 Tbps (terabits per second) mark for the first time.
DE-CIX currently servers over 480 Internet service providers from over 50 countries. At DE-CIX, more than 12 petabytes of data are exchanged per day.
“Although the traffic peak of over 2 Tbps marks a new high,” says Harald A. Summa, CEO at DE-CIX Management GmbH, “we do not see an end to data traffic growth on the horizon. We assume that Internet traffic will continue to grow by about 80 per cent per year in the future”. At DE-CIX, HD-TV, video and multimedia content, online gaming and cloud computing are considered the main drivers behind the continuing increase in data traffic.”
The switching fabric of DE-CIX has the potential to scale to 40 Tbps, according to Arnold Nipper, Technical Manager at DE-CIX. “The DE-CIX peering infrastructurehas a star-shaped topology and is spread out over a total of twelve data centers operated by different providers in the Frankfurt metropolitan area. The center of the DE-CIX peering star is composed of two redundant core switch clusters, one active and the other in hot standby mode. If there are any problems with the operative switch cluster, data traffic is immediately and automatically, in other words within milliseconds, routed to the other switch cluster so that data streams can flow continually without interruption. The central core switch clusters are redundantly connected to 14 other switches which are in turn connected to the ISPs.”
http://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/
- Equipment deployed in the DE-CIX distributed fabric includes Force10 Networks’ Terascale platform.
