Network Disaggregation at a World Leading Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Richard Petrie LINX CTO

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1 Network Disaggregation at a World Leading Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Richard Petrie LINX CTO

2 What is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP)

3 What is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Service Providers Content Providers An Internet exchange is a place where many types of providers and organisations can come together to interconnect their technology Enterprise Telecoms

4 What is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Service Providers Content Providers Providers are able to make a single connection to the IX, allowing them to exchange traffic with many participants Enterprise Telecoms

5 What is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Service Providers Content Providers This makes the Internet faster, more efficient and brings down costs for everyone using the exchange Enterprise Telecoms

6 The London Internet Exchange (LINX) Set up in 1994 by five UK Internet Service Providers Objectiv es were: to keep traffic local (UK) reduce networking costs improve business process for the exchange of internet traffic Started as a shared initiativ e, non-for-profit, membership based organisation, and has remained that way since Today we have ov er 780+ members from 75 countries LINX operates six Internet exchange points across the UK and North America LINX supports over 23TB/s of access capacity, taking in over 20 data centre points of presence

7 How does Internet Connectivity Work?

8 The Internet is essentially a network of networks, traffic is passed between them in order to get customers to their content or intended location Internet Service Provider Cloud Hosted Content The traditional route for Internet traffic can result in upstream bottlenecks, unknown routing, higher prices and higher latency, often providing a bad experience for your customers

9 Why Disaggregation? How does this challenge the way we work?

10 Network Components at an IXP Dark fibre network, passive components to build multiple waves/channels, with some amplification Optical transport, active components, commonly termed datacenter interconnection (DCI), with coherent technology for driving multiple 100GE Ethernet channels Ethernet network spanning >10 Datacentres, fully meshed to provide any to any connectivity

11 Network Components at an IXP Network Operating system, tuned to provide IXP features, like a stretched datacentre fabric and sub 100ms convergence Network automation, to provide simplified deployments, in-life analytics and any-to-any SLA visibility

12 Network Design and Decision Points Option 1: Trusted partners that do it all Can be expensiv e Sometimes lacks agility for IXP needs Technology inv estment in the ecosystem is typically multipaced

13 Network Design and Decision Points Option 2: Disaggregation, white boxes and build it yourself Well established inside datacenters ov er the last 3-5 years Higher demand on in-house dev elopment skills Standard components that scale and offer features tuned to the specific need at hand Modular ecosystem allowing more granular inv estment cycles

14 Network Design and Decision Points How do we get the flexibility, cost benefits of disaggregation but only with a small team of developers?

15 London2 (LON2) Network Disaggregation Project

16 What we select was a disaggregated platform, designed on an extend datacentre leaf and spine architecture, a new datacentre interconnection (DCI) solution, based on coherent optical transport, flexible third party optics from Finisar. Network devices from Edgecore Networks, using Broadcom Silicon and IP Infusion s OcNOS network operation system software, tuned to provide an EVPN based IP transport service

17 Network Automation

18 Automation from Start to Finish Moving to a top of rack, leaf and spine architecture from a multi-slot, fabric based deployment 1 dev ice becomes 10, 10 becomes 100 Monitoring, network awareness and capacity planning Changing the way we think about network components Configuration as code Abstracted network architecture, imbedded resilience API layer for user fulfilment Ansible playbooks to driv e execution

19 Network Investment

20 Changing the investment model Capital investment Extending a spine or adding a leaf v s adding or augmenting a new monolithic network component Modular, smaller increments, smoother growth patterns Lower buy price per 1Gb ingress/egress Operational expenditure Increase in dev elopment skills, automation systems and team education Increase in testing and QA capabilities Lower support charges

21 To conclude

22 The path we took Focus on; Partnership Talent inv estment Testing Open working practices Building trusted information flows Open Compute Project and Open Networking Forum have provided significant momentum and knowledge share

23 In Summary Building strong partnerships across the peering eco-system, integrating service offerings, and enhancing the service delivery workflow Building networks that scale at cost and embrace disruptive technologies and connectivity solutions Remain reliable, providing industry leading, service availability Network, peering and services Automation, fully automated and self aware network systems Look at your people, culture and actively engage in change

24 Thank You facebook.com/londoninternetex change tw itter.com/linx_netw ork linkedin.com/company /linx