ECIX deploys Infinera Cloud Xpress for data centre interconnect

In August 2016, ECIX was acquired by Megaport (Europe) Limited, the European subsidiary of Megaport Limited (ASX: MP1) (Megaport), a global provider of elastic interconnection services across Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe.

Working closely with Infinera partner TechAccess, a value-added information technology and networking solution provider, ECIX deployed the Infinera Cloud Xpress to expand capacity between multiple data centres in Frankfurt and support its customers’ growing bandwidth demands.

With Cloud Xpress, ECIX benefits from Infinera’s unique photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology, which delivers a 500 gigabit per second (Gb/s) wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) super-channel over 150 kilometers without additional multiplexers or amplifiers.

The Cloud Xpress incorporates Infinera’s Instant Bandwidth technology to allow customers to software-activate line-side WDM bandwidth in 100 Gb/s increments as and when needed, closely matching their end-customer demands.

In addition, the Cloud Xpress is designed for plug-and-play installation with simplified provisioning and support for data centre automation using open software-defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs).

“ECIX is experiencing strong growth in Frankfurt and other markets, and we needed a solution that provided compact, simple scalability with support for 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) over WDM,” said Kay Rechthien, CTO at ECIX. “The Infinera Cloud Xpress is a great fit for our Internet Exchange environment with its high density, Instant Bandwidth scalability and extreme operational simplicity.”

“We are pleased to deliver the Cloud Xpress to ECIX, one of Europe’s leading Internet Exchange providers,” said Nick Walden, Senior Vice President, EMEA at Infinera. “The compact design, ease of use and scalability of Cloud Xpress enables IX providers like ECIX to increase capacity and grow their business rapidly and cost-effectively. Working with ECIX and TechAccess, we are demonstrating how the Cloud Xpress can deliver the capacity needed to interconnect rapidly growing metro IX ecosystems.”

The Infinera Cloud Xpress Family is designed to deliver cloud-optimised WDM solutions to service providers, internet content providers, IX service providers, enterprises and other large-scale data centre operators.

The Cloud Xpress Family offers customers the choice of 10 GbE, 40 GbE and 100 GbE client interfaces to meet their specific requirements. Infinera recently introduced the Cloud Xpress 2 based on the Infinite Capacity Engine and offering 1.2 terabits per second of line-side WDM bandwidth in one rack unit, scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2017.