LINX announces Nokia as technical partner for its interconnection platform

Author: Isha Jain

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has announced that it has committed to investing in a full network refresh of its US interconnection platform – LINX NoVA.

Nokia has now been named as the technical partner to support LINX through this refresh, due to take place later this year.

LINX NoVA was launched back in 2014, with the ambition of building a multi data centre, interconnected platform for the internet community in the US. Nearly 10 years on, the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) continue to welcome new connected members and data centre partners to the community, but Richard Petrie, CTO for LINX, recognised the need to add even further value to networks connected there.

“We are replacing all of our legacy devices at LINX NoVA that have served us very well over the years, but it’s getting to a point where we need to refresh the technology and design in order to add more members and grow the Internet Exchange Point. Northern Virginia remains at the heart of US connectivity and our mission is to deliver increased capacity and to bring more networks together. With many more of our members connecting at 100GE, we are also getting requests for 400GE capacity, so we need to be prepared and be able to deliver these in the near future.”

LINX has been working with Nokia as a technical supplier for nearly two years. The partnership was born with Nokia supplying its 7750 SR-7s edge routers for LINX locations in London to enable members connected there to order 400GE services.

The technical partnership has gone from strength to strength with Nokia being selected for LINX’s new interconnection platform in Kenya, LINX Nairobi, late last year and now for the refresh of the LINX NoVA network planned for this year.

LINX NoVA will be deploying Nokia’s 7220 IXR routers, running Nokia’s SR Linux NOS, to provide L2 connectivity services to connect sites across Northern Virginia. Leveraging its leadership in both EVPN and VXLAN routing capabilities, the platform will have the scale and performance it needs to turn up services quickly and efficiently. With Nokia’s model driven routing architecture and rich telemetry, it will be able to get the absolute most from its manageability and automation capabilities.

The platform network refresh will enhance the capabilities and performance for existing networks connected at the IXP. It will also assist in the deployment and running of LINX’s range of interconnection services available at its London platform. This includes not only peering services, but closed user groups, private vLAN connections and also, coming soon, the exclusive Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS).