Nokia boosts IXPs with focus on scale, reliability, and automation

As the local interconnection points for more than 5,000 member organisations, these six IXPs cumulatively transport close to 45Tbps of traffic during peak times – a figure that’s set to grow as the Equinix Global Interconnection Index (GXI) 2024 predicts a stunning 34% five-year CAGR in interconnection bandwidth.

The expanding digital economy, proliferation of Edge compute, and anticipated move of latency-sensitive AI models to regional clouds for local consumption are contributing to the need for what the GXI calls an Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA). According to the GXI 2024 report, ‘The economics of data, density, velocity, and experience demand localised exchange to move the highest volumes of data with the lowest latency to dense clusters of participants and population centres.’

Built to handle these current and future pressures, the characteristics of the Nokia IP, optical, and security solutions align to those identified in the IOA and are central to why the Nokia portfolio has increasingly become the dominant choice of leading IXPs.

The Nokia FP5 800GE technology, deployed by leading European IXPs including Germany’s DE-CIX and the Netherlands’ NL-ix , provides the fastest possible performance in the industry and is realising dramatic sustainability gains. Since deploying this technology, NL-ix has shown a reduction in power consumption from 0.8 watts to 0.1 watts per gigabit in parts of its network.

Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX, said: “Nokia’s 800GE technology gives us the considerable runway needed to address future traffic growth in a cost- and energy-efficient way. 800GE optics consume the least amount of space and power per bit, and at the same time it provides the most headroom for traffic peaks of the future.”

Nokia has also played a leadership role in the standardisation of Ethernet Virtual Private Networks (EVPNs). With functionality and scalability, the SROS implementation of EVPN provides IXPs an ideal toolset to manage the increase in traffic. When Telehouse America selected Nokia to upgrade its NYIIX peering exchange infrastructure in the US, it deployed the Nokia EVPN solution to resolve multiple technical challenges.

Akio Sugeno, Vice President of Telehouse and founder of NYIIX, said: “EVPN is a game changer for us. It is a next-generation VPN solution that provides a unified architecture, in both the control and data planes, and solved many of our requirements. With our new EVPN implementation from Nokia we police and control broadcast, unknown-unicast, and multicast traffic entering our network while also rate-limiting ARP requests, so they do not flood our network. With this same protocol, we are also able to implement load balancing techniques between our Edge and the customer’s network to increase resiliency and network availability. Finally, with EVPN’s auto-configuration capabilities we can simplify operational complexity across the entire lifecycle of our VPNs.”

Additionally, the virulent rise in cybercrime has made anti-DDoS solutions critical. Nokia partnered with NL-ix for deployment of an anti-DDoS solution that performs mitigation directly on the router, avoiding dedicated scrubbing centres that would push up transport costs and impact latency. Nokia’s AI-enhanced Deepfield Defender actively detects DDoS attacks and then instructs Nokia’s FP5 silicon to block those packet flows without any impact on other router traffic.

Jan Hoogenboom, Founder and Chief Vision Officer at NL-ix, said: “With this innovative anti-DDoS solution from Nokia we can provide our customers with security across their entire area of operations as we pursue our goal of zero enterprise downtime. We are now a one-stop-shop for Europe-wide connectivity and security, saving our customers the hassle of working with multiple parties or making complex arrangements to be protected by a third party.”

Vach Kompella, Senior Vice President and General Manager of IP Networks business at Nokia, said: “As the nerve centres of the Internet, the world’s largest IXPs are host to every type of traffic and customer, and in response they have reset expectations around networking innovation – driving the highest levels of uptime, reliability, and security with Nokia solutions. We are proud to be the leading provider of networking infrastructure solutions for these critical organisations.” 

Nokia has won contracts with 23 IXPs, and has publicly announced wins with Telehouse NYIIX, NL-ix, LINX, LINX NoVa, BIX, DE-CIX, France-ix, ESpanix, LINX Nairobi, TOP-ix, and TREX.