* Foundry switches form backbone of Amsterdam Internet Exchange
The world’s largest public Internet exchange is installing three 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from Foundry Networks.
The Amsterdam Internet Exchange anticipates peak traffic to exceed 100G bit/sec by the end of this month; overall volume is growing 9% per month.
It’s the world’s largest public peering Internet exchange in terms of bandwidth, clients and switch ports. The exchange is independent, interconnecting IP networks from more than 220 ISPs and carriers through four co-locations in Amsterdam.
The four locations all currently have Foundry BigIron switches in a double-star topology, Foundry says.
To handle the high volume, the exchange is putting in three BigIron RX-16 Layer 2/3 switches to form the backbone of the exchange network. These switches will go in two of the four locations.
This is the biggest and most powerful of Foundry’s switches. It has a switching capacity of 1.536 terabits per second. Foundry says the switches will eventually be configured with 64 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to interconnect the edge switches. Some of the 10 Gigabit ports are even expected to serve as direct connections to the exchange’s members.
The RX-16 was introduced in the spring along with two smaller versions, the RX-4 and RX-8. In addition to Internet exchanges, the switches are aimed at high-performance computing environments, which have recently been a key Foundry focus.
Their strength is in large network connections packed densely into a small space. While the Amsterdam network is putting in 64 ports of 10 Gigabit per switch, the switches are capable of handling up to 192 wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 2,304 wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet ports in a standard seven-foot telco rack.
