In the early days DE-CIX was a traditional Internet Exchange but with the change of traffic patterns concentrating more around cloud providers, and at the same time declining costs for internet transit, they had to re-think their profile. This begun their metamorphosis from being solely an Internet Exchange to what DE-CIX define themselves as today – an interconnection platform.
The creation of Internet Exchanges is a phenomenon that spread across the globe at pace in the 1990’s. In Norway we have NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) which has 67 customers with daily peaks in traffic of around 170Gbps. In comparison, DE-CIX sees daily traffic peaks of above 14.4 and serving more than 1,100 connected networks.
The trend we see with Internet Exchanges is the additional products that are available, below we list four products that we believe can have a positive impact on datacenter ecosystems across the Nordics.
1. DirectCLOUD
DirectCloud is a compilation of the largest Cloud Service Providers and the largest PaaS and SaaS in the world. As a private direct connection bypassing the Internet, the DirectCLOUD service minimizes downtime, the risk of DDOS attacks and guarantees continuous connection to your chosen cloud service providers at our Cloud Exchange. The unique and stable infrastructure reduces latency, allowing fast and effective collaboration in the cloud. This ensures a seamless setup for our Colocation clients between the Private cloud they manage themselves in our facilities and their Public Cloud. Via one single port, customers can establish their secured connection to e.g., AWS and Azure. The benefits are many, but the top three are: 1. A cloud exchange with more than 50 cloud service providers; 2. Private and direct connection bypassing the internet and 3. A simple, cost-efficient setup with flexible terms.
2. DirectCLOUD – Cloudfinder for service providers in Denmark and Norway
The DirectCloud product is mainly used by Telco providers and Enterprises and System Integrators to connect into various Public Clouds.
The System Integrators in Norway and Denmark however have a unique opportunity to reach a broader audience and secure high-quality connections to their end users. Today the German market has adopted the DE-CIX platform and joined the marketplace, ensuring the mentioned benefits are being felt by their clients.
3. GlobePeer remote
Fast and secure connection to the rest of the world could be a huge benefit for many Nordic customers interacting with international markets. The traditional way to do this is to buy dedicated capacity (wavelengths) from the home market and into the desired markets, then buy Colocation and start exchanging traffic locally. This is still a good way if you reach a very high bandwidth (10Gbps +), but if the traffic is limited and spread out over many different markets then GlobePEER Remote could be a very good tool to explore.
By connecting to a port in e.g., Esbjerg, DK (the same port used for Cloud connections), then the company can connect to New York or Frankfurt, ensuring direct access to the many thousands of networks available in these regions. This has earlier been something used only be ISPs, but the trend is changing, and we see large enterprises doing peering in their foreign marketplaces.
An example of this is DSV which today operates ASN 49362 and is connected to exchanges in Hong Kong, Dallas, Johannesburg and Copenhagen with the following note: With offices and facilities in more than 80 countries on six continents, we provide and run supply chain solutions for thousands of companies on a daily basis. Our reach is global yet our presence is local and close to our customers. (Disclaimer – DSV is currently not using DE-CIX but only used as example)
4. GlobePEER
GlobePEER is the traditional Peering/Internet Exchange product of DE-CIX. This product is now serving almost 40 local markets and is now coming to the Nordic region. A high-performing data center should have a high-performing eco-system supporting it.
This means a lot of networks connecting with each other (primarily over an IX) and the larger the eco-system grows the more attractive the location gets. In Frankfurt, new networks are joining on an almost daily basis, and we’ve seen some of the same trends at OS-IX, where networks come to join other networks. This will ultimately also attract large cloud providers as they have easier access to the entire country’s local ISP market and therefore makes the handover of traffic to the ISP, ergo the clients, more sufficient at a lower cost. When the location has grown significantly then an EYEBALL effect has been created. This is the aim for the Exchanges in Esbjerg in Denmark and Kristiansand in Norway, where both countries solely rely on their capitals to act as local exchange points.