LINX NoVA, LINX’s first overseas Internet exchange, is located in the Northern Virginia region of the United States. We caught up with LINX Chief Technical Officer, Richard Petrie, to learn more about the US interconnection hub, the local market, and the strategy for developing and growing the exchange in the future.
LINX NoVA History and Local Ecosystem
Richard: The exchange has now been around since 2014, and we’ve seen some significant growth in the exchange over there, not just in the number of members, but in the number of sites that we connect into. When we first went over into NoVA, this was part of a wider, OpenIX initiative that was going on in the US at the time and we selected the Northern Virginia region, as it’s one of the central points for Internet connectivity, not just in the US, but globally. LINX went in there with the ambition of trying to create a multi data centre ecosystem, a peering ecosystem that could serve the community and I think the fact that we’re now ten years down the line, and we’re still there, we’re still growing, we still have interest in expanding, speaks volumes for what is needed and what continues to be needed in Northern America.
Partner Relationships
LINX have been working with a number of partners at LINX NoVA across three city locations over the years. Currently, these are Iron Mountain in Manassas, Coresite in Reston, and QTS, Digital Realty and Equinix in Ashburn.
Richard: Yes, with datacentres, they do change hands so when we first started back in 2014, we were working with another company that’s now been acquired through Digital Realty, but we have fantastic relationships with all our partners. With Equinix, we have been serving our members, customers of Equinix, for a while, but they’ve been connecting into our fabric through an optical extension from the Equinix site. What we’re working towards now is extending our fabric into the Equinix datacentre facilities and that, I think, will be huge for LINX members, and for Equinix customers who do look for multi IX connectivity nowadays. They do want diversity in the ecosystem, and I think the partnership with Equinix and LINX will bring our members a great amount of value there. As far as the other partners, we continue to work with each of them. They have their own footprint of customers in their datacentres, in their particular geographies. We interconnect all of them as we do in any other metro city, and we provide a completely neutral any-to-any connection platform that our customers, our partners, can get access to.
Products and Services
So what about the services that members and networks can expect from LINX NoVA? Does it match what happens elsewhere on the LINX network?
Richard: We always aim to deliver the same set of services at every Internet exchange that we provide around the world. One of our key goals is to say what we provide in one of the main London datacentres or London Metros, we will also provide the same services, whether that’s at LINX Manchester, in north of England, or in North America at LINX NoVA. So absolutely, all of the products, all of the services that we provide to LINX members in London will also be provided to LINX members over in North Virginia, and that’s everything from the traditional peering service that we have had since 1994, plus some of these more later developed products, which are the overlay, such as Closed User Groups, the Private VLANs, Cloud Interconnect, and the Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS) as well. Whenever we go into launching a new product, we look at the platforms that we have in place and we say can we make sure that we can deliver the same type of product, same type of service? That is what the members expect from us, the same level of service availability that we provide in any of our peering fabrics.
LINX NoVA Network Developments and Strategy
The LINX NoVA network infrasture is undergoing a refresh. What does that involve and what’s the future strategy for the exchange?
Richard: Yes, so with the partnership with Equinix and with the promotion of the 100GE service*, we’re keen to see another phase of growth in the LINX NoVA region. We are going to replace some legacy devices that have served us very well over the ten years, but it’s getting to a point where we need to refresh the technology and add more capacity. We do want to deliver more 100GE ports, but also, we’ve got members that are wanting to connect at 400GE now, so it won’t be too far in the future where we’re going to see 400GE orders for LINX NoVA as well, so we want to be prepared. We want to make sure that we’ve got the scale and the capacity in place to meet the short-term needs, but also the capacity demands from the members in the long term. We’ve been working with a partner, Nokia, for a while now for putting in a leaf and spine type peering platform. That will hopefully be done in quarter three, running through the August to September period of 2023. That will continue to add capacity and capability into the LINX NoVA region, but it will also support all the current products and services that we offer today.
Member Community and Exchange Growth
What about the membership of LINX NoVA? What kind of networks are connecting there? What kind of traffic levels are we looking at? How much has the exchange grown over the last few years?
Richard: With all of our exchanges, we tend to see a nice healthy mixture of eyeball networks, end user networks, subscriber type users and content. The role of the IX is to bring that together to meet the content and the end user but what we’ve seen, and what we continue to see, is much more diversity in the value of what is offered across the whole exchange. This is whether it’s a different type of business, maybe an enterprise business, or even with the more distributed workforce end user that’s now working in a slightly different way. So, we see growth as we do in London, as we do in other regions. We see a change in the way that traffic flows between members and what type of members are coming in and joining the exchange. I think that diversity in the membership ecosystem will continue as part of our plan to try and invest and grow in the LINX NoVA region and from a membership point of view, we continue to try and add member’s traffic. We hit around about 100 gigabits per second as a peak traffic and with the great partnerships that we’ve forged over the years, we actually think we can break through that 100 gigabit peak traffic barrier pretty quickly. Where it goes from there, let’s see.
*LINX NoVA 100GE Promotion
LINX is offering members the opportunity to order a 100gig port with a 100 gigabit per second peering service at the LINX NoVA LAN for twelve months at the price of just six times the usual monthly port fee with nothing to pay for the first six months.
100GE Promotion – Terms & Conditions
This offer is valid from the 1st June until the 30th November 2023.
Please complete the form below for more details.
For more information on how to connect to LINX NoVA please visit our network page on the LINX website.
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