The Amsterdam Internet Exchange - AMSIX
Reliable networking at the Fastest Place on Earth.
An Internet Exchange is a meeting point for independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) enabling them to exchange Internet traffic with each other, nationally and internationally. This exchange of traffic is known as “peering.” Since without peering, the Internet is nothing, network reliability at Internet Exchanges is of extreme importance.
The Amsterdam Internet Peering Exchange (AMS-IX) is one of the largest Internet Exchanges in the world. With more than 250 participants, including the largest ISP’s in Europe and North America, AMS-IX traffic currently hits peak rates of 230 Gb/s almost daily. Even at this volume, it is continuing to experience exponential growth driven by increasingly bandwidth-heavy applications like video streaming.
This growth rate would tax the capacity of any data center. So, a few years ago, the technical staff at the Exchange began to investigate the possibility of building a more robust, future-proof topology with built-in redundancy. The AMS-IX network engineers have designed and implemented a solution that permits their Exchange to handle the exponential growth while creating system level redundancy for better protection against network outages and equipment failures and enabling the instantaneous and transparent switch-over for new equipment installations. Their innovative design is based on Layer 2 Ethernet switches and MEMS-based Photonic Cross-Connects.
Figure 1. The AMS-IX Topology
AMS-IX is a distributed exchange, currently present at four independent co-location facilities in Amsterdam. This provides part of the geographical diversity required in a reliable network design. Each site is equipped with one or more Ethernet switches to enable connections to the AMS-IX infrastructure. The AMS-IX topology is built around two hub/spoke arrangements, in the figure the components of each are connected by either blue or red lines.
Foundry Networks Ethernet Layer 2 switches (core-tel-03, core-nik-04) are used as dual hubs. Participants with 1GE, 100BaseTX or 10baseT lines are connected to the edge switches in the middle of the picture. Each of these edge switches is connected to both core switches. Participants with 10GE lines are connected directly to Glimmerglass Photonic Cross-Connects. These Layer 1 switches connect the 10GE ports to the relevant Foundry Networks switch.
The two core switches run VSRP (Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol) to define the active hub/spoke and to automatically fail over to the other, based on pre-defined triggers (e.g. link failure) The edge switches follow VSRP automatically. The Glimmerglass switches, in turn, follow the VSRP failover based on software developed at AMS-IX.
In addition to operational redundancy, this approach also has the advantage of enabling AMS-IX to test one switch (Ethernet or Photonic) with each build-out (new version of system software and interfaces) and ensure that it is working properly before involving the second switch. In this way the Exchange can always fall back to a “known good” situation if they experience a problem.
The reliability of the Exchange’s data communications was a critical consideration for the network design team at every juncture. Reliability is one of AMS-IX’S competitive strengths and a feature expected by its participants. For more information on AMS-IX, visit: www.ams-ix.net.
