Global Internet exchange AMS-IX scales to 400G to sustain growth

AMS-IX in Amsterdam, Netherlands, is one of the world’s largest hubs for Internet traffic. It continues to grow rapidly as technology impacts almost every facet of people’s lives. In 2021, AMS-IX saw an 18% growth in data volume.

AMS-IX needed a faster, more efficient way to exchange traffic between networks from all over the world. The company turned to Juniper’s 400G routers to get the job done.

Overview


Company AMS-IX
Industry Service Provider
Products used MX10004 and MX10008
Region EMEA
AMS-IX Hero
Customer Success At-a-glance

26.85

Exabytes of data exchanged by AMS-IX in 2021

18%

Growth in data volume in 2021

400G

Open, programmable routers improve customer experience and enable differentiated services delivery

880+

Networks connected 

Challenge

Society runs on digital

Data volumes at AMS-IX saw a 35% spike at the start of the pandemic. Traffic has since leveled off, but the company is still experiencing double-digit growth as gaming, streaming media, cloud storage, and other Internet services become part of everyday life.

“Worldwide traffic continues to increase,” says Ruben van den Brink, CTO of AMS-IX. “There’s a constant need for more bandwidth.”

As AMS-IX planned for efficient growth, it wanted a more scalable way to serve customers’ needs for Internet and mobile peering, private interconnect, cloud access, and managed Internet exchange services.

“The flexibility of our platform is important for us,” says van den Brink. “To deliver the experience our customers expect, we need the ability to deploy new services or change the services we have.” 

AMX-IX Challenge
Solution

400G delivers performance at scale

AMS-IX is shifting to Juniper routing to achieve performance at scale, offer customers a choice of 400G, 100G, and 10G ports, and gain agility for the future. The transition began at its Amsterdam location, and ultimately allow AMS-IX to scale up at 16 colocations.

“We think that using Juniper will make the migration as smooth as possible,” says van den Brink.

The Juniper MX10008 Universal Routing Platform with the Juniper MX10K-LC9600 Line Card allows AMS-IX to deliver a better customer experience with greater operational efficiency. The MX10K-LC9600 Line Card is powered by Trio 6, Juniper’s next-generation ASIC, providing the highest throughput density in the multiservice edge market today.

The Juniper MX10008 router provides tremendous logical scale and flexibility, while supporting a comprehensive set of multiservice edge use cases. It offers extensible programmability to innovate new functional requirements on Juniper Trio chips without requiring hardware upgrades.  

“Juniper routers had the highest functionality and flexibility of configuration when we tested our IXP configuration,” he says. “Juniper just worked.”

AMX-IX Solution
Outcome

An open platform for sustainable innovation

As a neutral, member-based association, AMS-IX has been at the heart of the Internet for more than 25 years. Open standards have always been a priority, and sustainability is a growing focus for the decades ahead.

AMS-IX found a likeminded partner in Juniper, with demonstrated commitment to open standards, network programmability, and sustainability. Industry standards and open source help AMS-IX achieve greater agility and streamline operations, especially as it develops next-generation orchestration and automation tools.

“With the MX platform, we can use open APIs and modeling languages and protocols like YANG and NETCONF to deploy services automatically,” says van den Brink. “When you look at integrating other products with Juniper, the work often has been done by the open source community.”

The innovation that comes from an agile, sustainable, and programmable network will help AMS-IX continue to meet the evolving needs of a digital society. 

AMX-IX Outcome
“AMS-IX is looking for new technologies and solutions that can drive sustainability in our sector, and we look for partners who are up for this challenge. We believe AMS-IX and Juniper are aligned on sustainability.”
Ruben van den Brink CTO, AMS-IX

Published June 2022