The London Internet Exchange (LINX) are close to completing a full network migration at their regional UK interconnection point, LINX Manchester.
Launched in 2012, LINX Manchester is located at four data centre sties in the city, two at Equinix, M247 and TeleData. Networks connected to LINX Manchester from these data centre facilities benefit from regional peering, which means exchanging their traffic locally with other networks. This improves network latency as it avoids traffic ‘tromboning’ to and from London more often than it needs to.
The aim of the LINX Manchester migration project is to shift the current technical set up to the successful disaggregated model, deployed on LINX’s LON2 network in London back in 2018. LINX were the first Internet exchange in the world to deploy this disaggregated set up on such a large scale, using hardware from Edgecore Networks and software from IP Infusion.
The engineering team will be mirroring the LON2 set up at LINX Manchester with suppliers Edgecore Networks and IP Infusion, moving away from the single supplier source, to give local members increased flexibility and continued value for their membership.
Mark Lloyd, Principal Network Engineer at LINX says;
“The disaggregated set up is more cost effective and allows us to deliver more long-term technical improvements and capabilities faster.”
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How the new LINX Manchester network map will look
While working on the migration, the LINX team also re-engineered the fibre connection from the newest LINX Manchester PoP (point of presence), TeleData. TeleData is being made a full site for LINX Manchester with 100G capabilities being enabled. The previous set up for the data centre had a single point of failure with only one connection to an existing LINX Manchester PoP, so LINX are making improvements here, adding diverse fibres to improve the redundancy for networks connecting to the exchange from the TeleData site.
Matt Edgley, Director at TeleData UK says;
“It’s been very interesting to see the levels of take-up from our existing colocation clients, really illustrating the value of regional peering on LINX Manchester for network operators. We’ve seen the momentum build very rapidly within Teledata as significant content providers and members continue to join the exchange from our site. As a data centre provider, we’ve also benefited significantly by being one of the key locations for interconnectivity direct into LINX Manchester’s core, which is where members want to be.”
LINX Manchester has over 120 networks connected, a mix of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and large content networks. Traffic regularly exceeds 100Gbps and in November last year, the exchange hit a new maximum traffic peak of 174.13Gbps, making LINX Manchester one of the busier exchanges in Europe.
Register for the LINX Manchester Virtual Meeting
LINX members can register via the portal for our upcoming event the LINX Manchester Virtual Meeting taking place on the 31st March. The agenda is packed with more engineering updates and member talks, specific to our Manchester exchange. Non LINX members can email marketing@linx.net to register.
