New data throughput peak at DE-CIX Internet exchange point in Frankfurt

Frankfurt/Main, 21 September 2012 – DE-CIX, the world’s largest Internet exchange, located in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), has achieved a new data throughput record: Internet traffic at DE-CIX exceeded the 2 Tbit/s (terabits per second) mark for the first time ever. More than 480 Internet service providers from over 50 countries are currently connected to the Internet exchange, bringing the Net and its content to millions of households around the globe. At DE-CIX, more than 12 petabyte of data are exchanged per day, a volume corresponding to 2.7 million DVDs. “Although the traffic peak of over 2 Tbit/s marks a new high,” says Harald A. Summa, CEO at DE-CIX Management GmbH, “we do not see an end to data traffic growth on the horizon. We assume that Internet traffic will continue to grow by about 80 per cent per year in the future”. At DE-CIX, HD-TV, video and multimedia content, online gaming and cloud computing are considered the main drivers behind the continuing increase in data traffic.

DE-CIX infrastructure well-equipped for more growth
Arnold Nipper, Technical Manager at DE-CIX, is not worried about the forecasts predicting high growth rates for data traffic at the Frankfurt Internet Exchange: “DE-CIX’s technical infrastructure is an extremely efficient and failsafe platform for exchanging Internet traffic with a maximum data throughput capacity of up to 40 Tbit/s. In addition, we of course continue to refine the platform to meet future demands.” The DE-CIX peering infrastructure has a star-shaped topology and is spread out over a total of twelve data centers operated by different providers in the Frankfurt metropolitan area.  The center of the DE-CIX peering star is composed of two redundant core switch clusters, one active and the other in hot standby mode.  If there are any problems with the operative switch cluster, data traffic is immediately and automatically, in other words within milliseconds, routed to the other switch cluster so that data streams can flow continually without interruption.  The central core switch clusters are redundantly connected to 14 other switches which are in turn connected to the ISPs.

DE-CIX traffic can be observed here: http://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/