Sep 17 2019
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IX-API For the Good of the Internet

By | Europe, General, International, LINX News, News

Global Internet Exchange Leaders Develop Universal API

Today at EPF (European Peering Forum) taking place in Tallinn, Estonia, it was announced that the world’s leading Internet Exchange operators AMS-IX (Amsterdam), DE-CIX (Frankfurt) and LINX (London) have joined forces to develop a common Application Programming Interface (API) to provision and configure interconnection services. This so-called IX-API will improve productivity for their members, customers and partners alike. It allows users to self-manage their existing and new interconnection services such as peering more effectively, from ordering new ports to monitoring provisioning processes.

The consortium of the three Internet Exchanges also called on common member and connectivity partner Epsilon and data centre partner Interxion to act as pilot customers for the new software. Both partners’ tests came out with positive results and they will be joining the exchanges at the European Peering Forum (EPF) to present and demonstrate the tool to the rest of the Internet and telecommunications community.

Dr Thomas King, Chief Technology Officer at DE-CIX says;
“DE-CIX ambition has always been to make customers life easier and connect them anywhere needed on the planet. Therefore, we are pleased to have come together with our partners to create this IX-API from scratch. We are convinced that this new industry standard will be adopted by other Internet Exchanges and interconnection providers.”

Richard Petrie, Chief Technology Officer for LINX adds;
“Our software and engineering teams have collaborated, working hard to create this modern RESTful API based on OpenAPI Specification v3 for managing IXPs customers and services.”

Henk Steenman, Chief Technology Officer for AMS-IX says;
“At AMS-IX, we are very proud that the three largest exchanges join forces, collaborate and have reached consensus to deliver the common IX-API project. In a very competitive market, we have found a common ambition and drive for the greater good of the internet.”

There is a large percentage of member and customer crossover between all three exchanges, working with the same remote peering partners and data centres. Being able to work with and offer out to the community, a universal API tool is a huge step forward for the industry. Find out more about the IX-API collaboration project here: www.ix-api.net

Photograph above shows the IX teams being joined by members of the team from Epsilon and Interxion as they conduct their live demonstrations of the tool at EPF14 in Tallinn on 17th September.

Photograph to the left shows from left to right: Henk Steenman, CTO AMS-IX, Thomas King, CTO DE-CIX, Richard Petrie, CTO LINX as they prepare for their presentation at the European Peering Forum.

Jul 15 2019
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LINX to Recruit New Chair for its Executive Board

By | LINX News, News

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) are actively recruiting a replacement non-executive Chairperson for its Board of Directors.

LINX is the largest, solely member-run Internet exchange in the World, with over 880 network ASNs currently connected to one or more of their seven global interconnection points. Being a non- profit member owned organisation, the LINX Board plays a pivotal part in the running of the exchange, so finding the right candidate is crucial.

 

”We are seeking a candidate that shows a good understanding of our industry sector and the role LINX plays in the ecosystem.

John Souter, LINX CEO

LINX is the largest, solely member-run Internet exchange in the World, with over 880 network ASNs currently connected to one or more of their seven global interconnection points. Being a non- profit member owned organisation, the LINX Board plays a pivotal part in the running of the exchange, so finding the right candidate is crucial.

The primary service LINX offers is to facilitate the passing of data, or Internet traffic, from network to network on a large scale over a secure, resilient platform. This process is called ‘peering’ and with the huge growth in data and Internet resilience set to multiply incredibly over the next few years, it’s an exciting opportunity for a new Chair to join the Board.

The Chair is expected to champion the vision, mission and core values of LINX both within the Board and when speaking on behalf of the Board. This includes ensuring that their strategy and key Board decisions are made with these fundamentals in mind.

LINX’s vision is to provide an open community of network operators interconnecting to maintain an “Internet for Everyone” all without interference. The mission of LINX is to provide world-leading Internet Exchange Points that provide increasing performance and value for its members. It also aims to represent their interests in matters of public policy.

The LINX Board, as it stands, has a varied wealth of experience within the Telecommunications and Technology industry including three internal LINX senior members of staff and representatives from high profile organisations Google, Facebook and BT, who are all active LINX members too. Meet the current Board and explore more information on the role here; https://www.linx.net/about/meettheteam-theboard/

LINX are working with specialist recruitment consultants, Expand, to explore a broad recruitment pool thus to ensure the right candidate is found.

Jul 12 2019
0

Telehouse’s commitment to the connected community

By | LINX News

Telehouse’s Mark Pestridge, Sales Director, and Nick Layzell, Head of Managed Services (centre and left) speaking with LINX’s Jeremy Orbell at LINX105.

Telehouse Europe were platinum sponsors at LINX105 at the Park Plaza Victoria in May 2019. During their presentation, Mark Pestridge and Nick Layzell explained how its connected community will continue to drive its future plans in the face of ever changing business requirements. Mark had this to say about speaking at the event:

“As a partner of LINX for some 25 years and as a Platinum Sponsor for LINX 105, we were very pleased to be able take up the opportunity to provide an update on how the world at Telehouse is evolving. We thought it was very important to emphasize to the audience how we will continue to invest in and enhance our Docklands Campus.”

“Our parent company KDDI is committed providing our existing and future customers will with the flexibility and agility to grow as their business requires within the Campus. We also thought it important to talk through what we are seeing in terms of the changing demand for take up in the data centre world; specifically around Enterprise demand for hybrid cloud services and also new technology developments such as IOT and 5G. Following our presentation, it was really good to be able to be able to discuss some of the topics we raised in more detail during the networking sessions.”

You can view the full presentation video of Mark and Nick’s talk below.

After the presentation LINX’s Jeremy Orbell caught up with Mark and Nick to discuss the talk and the reaction of LINX105 attendees. You can view the short video interview on the LINX YouTube channel via the link below.

LINX105 Catch Up: Mark Pestridge & Nick Layzell
Jul 01 2019
0

Extracting economic and social insights from Internet traffic data

By | LINX News

Lead Data Scientist at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), gave a talk at LINX105 in May on a research project that’s exploring how different data sources can help gain insights into the data driven Internet economy.

Using data from the LINX traffic flow portal (https://portal.linx.net/) as a proxy/small window view of overall Internet traffic volume ONS have investigated the following:

  1. The potential to use traffic flow data to identify and measure Internet time-use
  2. Anomaly detection and traffic impact of large-scale events
  3. Relationship between traffic flow and various economic indicators

Philip commented:

“As part of our ongoing research in the newly formed Data Science Campus, part of the Office for National Statistics, we are currently exploring the wider theme of deriving social/economic indicators from alternative and novel data sources for potential use in new and experimental statistical outputs. One such project to emerge from this exciting research area aims to explore if it is possible to extract social and economic insights from real time internet traffic volume data. This talk summarises some insights discovered from data obtained from the LINX status monitoring portal which may be of interest to LINX members.”

The video of Philip’s talk can viewed in full below which led to much debate amongst those present at the event.

Philip Stubbings Biography

Philip Stubbings joined the ONS Data Science Campus in November 2016. He has since been applying computer vision and machine learning to image segmentation problems.

Prior to joining the campus, he had worked as a research software engineer in a number of areas including crop health monitoring, algorithmic trading, photometry, numerical control, optimisation and OR. He holds a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Essex.

Further Information
Jun 26 2019
0

LINX Upgrades Equipment at VIRTUS LONDON2 to Enable Growth & 100G Connections

By | Digital Britain, Europe, General, LINX News, News

Due to increased member and capacity demands, the London Internet Exchange are pleased to announce considerable port upgrades to their VIRTUS Data Centre peering location.

 

VIRTUS’ LONDON2 facility in Hayes joined LINX back in 2014 as an accessible (virtual) data centre facility, being upgraded then in 2016 to a ConneXions Access Point following member demand and LINX infrastructure being installed. A LINX ConneXions Access Point is based at a neutral data centre giving customers direct access to LINX infrastructure from within the data centre, thus improving performance of its peering connectivity.

Photograph features LINX Head of Sales, Jennifer Holmes
with Kelly Scott, VIRTUS Account Director (Education)

Darren Watkins, Managing Director from VIRTUS Data Centres is pleased with the partnership and new upgrade:

”Connectivity is key to the success of data centres and we are delighted that LINX has increased its capability for our customers at LONDON2. This industry critical peering service compliments our Cloud Connect services making LONDON2 a key hub for technology.

VIRTUS customers who become LINX members will also benefit from improved latency and resilience as well as transit performance and routing control. Increased capacity and redundancy at a lower cost are also key benefits to joining an Internet exchange such as LINX. The customers have the opportunity to peer with over 880 LINX member networks from over 80 countries worldwide across the dual LAN infrastructure in London, LON1 (Juniper) and LON2 (Edgecore Networks & IP Infusion).

LINX Head of Sales Jennifer Holmes says:

“We’re extremely pleased with the level of interest from new and existing members in connecting at the Virtus Hayes site. Our recent upgrade of equipment at this location allows networks to not only connect to our peering fabric in London but also gives them the option of larger port sizes and increased capacity – this is sure to encourage even more growth in the future.”

Find out more about VIRTUS Data Centres
View the LINX Network
Jun 24 2019
0

Zen’s Richard Tang on the future of Artificial Intelligence

By | LINX News

Richard Tang of Zen Internet recently gave a presentation at the LINX105 member conference on artificial intelligence, specifically focussing on when AI is likely to become super-intelligent.

In an industry where the pace of change is so great making predictions on this potentially globally life-changing subject isn’t easy but Richard takes an approach that covers human values as well technical enhancements. Richard told us:

“I very much enjoyed presenting my thoughts on the development of AI over the coming decades, and in particular the prospect of AI becoming super-intelligent. If my predictions are correct, then the changes we have ahead are much bigger than most people realise. There were some great questions and comments from the audience. I even accepted a bet from one member of the audience on what date AI would be clever enough to get rid of 100% of spam!”

You can view the video of Richard’s presentation on artificial intelligence below.

Richard previously spoke at LINX103 in November covering the development of the Internet since Zen’s inception in the mid-90s. An interesting aspect to that talk was the importance of staff when looking to grow a company.

“With Zen being privately owned I can simply decide I’m not going to take the usual approach. In a business sense we of course have sales targets but it’s not the be all and end all for us. What we want is happy staff, happy customers, and strong supplier relationships. Some say why would you put staff before customers but to me it’s clear that if you’re going to give an outstanding customer experience you have to start with your people.”

Further Information
Jun 19 2019
0

Pete Stevens of Mythic Beasts speaks on network automation

By | LINX News

At the LINX105 member conference on the 30th May Pete Stevens gave a presentation entitled ‘I have pre-emptively replaced you with a very small shell script’.

In this complex, yet informative, topic Pete covered the multiple layers of automation and the code needed to create the config that automated customer deployments as well as Mythic Beast’s own auditing. Pete told us:

“The only way to handle scale is to automate. In recent times LINX has dramatically scaled the number of members, which in turn compels members to automate their operations in order to take full advantage. At Mythic Beasts we’ve been automating operations for a long time and it was great to present to the LINX community an overview of the tools we use and some of the technical details of how.”

Pete has spoken at LINX events on a number of occasions and his technical talks always offer a fascinating insight to the challenges that a network like Mythic Beasts face. You can view the video of his presentation below.

Pete Stevens Biography

After earning a MSci degree in Physics at the University of Cambridge Pete Stevens went on to establish Mythic Beats in the year 2000. The ISP handles anything from little websites like the Cambridge Beer Festival to domain names, right through to larger sites like Raspberry Pi, which has successfully been hosted on a Raspberry Pi cluster despite handling hundreds of millions of daily http requests.

In addition Pete has also acted as an advisor for PurrMetrix Limited and We7 and was a developer at both Hypertag and IDnet. His specialities include IPv6, Raspberry PI, Networking, Load balancing, Apache, Tomcat, Mysql, Postgresql, Java, Perl and Linux.

Further Information
Jun 14 2019
0

London Colo Market – then, now and the future

By | LINX News

LINX105 presentation by Tim Anker, The Colocation Exchange (Colo-X)

At the LINX105 member conference on the 29th May Tim Anker of Colo-X presented a light-hearted but insightful analysis of the London colocation market over the past 20 years. Tim also looked at today’s key growth areas as well as offering predictions for future developments in the market. Among the questions covered in his talk were:

  • Why has total demand doubled in the past three years year-on-year?
  • Who are the new buyers and what impact is there demand having on the UK data centre market?
  • Who are the latest names and locations to enter the market?

Commenting on his involvement at LINX105 Tim said:

It was great fun to step back and go over what’s taken place these past 20 years. From the “dot-com” boom, when the price of 1Mbs was over £200 per month, to the post boom crash, the inevitable consolidation and then bringing things up to date, the evolution of the London data centre market continues to impress. With new entrants, new locations and some massive new hyperscale developments maintaining London’s position as the leading data centre market in Europe.

In delegate feedback the talk was rated as one of the best of the whole LINX105 meeting. You can view the full presentation below.

Tim Anker Biography

Tim Anker established The Colocation Exchange – or Colo-X as it is now known – in September 2004. Over the last 20 years, Tim has closed deals ranging from from 1U to 50,000 sq ft in locations all over the world, but with a focus on the retail colocation market in the UK. Tim also established a niche colocation business called Crosspoint Colocation which specialises in selling secure 1/4 and 1/2 racks in key London colocation ecosystems such as Telehouse or Equinix. At the end of 2018 Crosspoint became part of Amito Ltd who operate their own 1000 rack Reading data centre. Amito counts at least 40 LINX members as clients and continues to work closely with LINX.

Further Information
May 31 2019
6

LINX publishes 2018 Annual Report at LINX105 member conference in London

By | LINX News

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) officially published its 2018 annual report and accounts at the exchange’s annual general meeting on the 29th May.

The new document features an introduction from LINX Chairman Simon Woodhead, who was separately re-elected to LINX Board during the AGM. Simon had recently taken over as Chair from Murray Steele, who had served as LINX Chair for the previous three years.

“Murray made a strong contribution to LINX, especially by lending his expertise in corporate governance to modernise the Board’s structure and working practices. He helped make the Board much more effective, both as a guardian of the membership’s interests and as a supervisor of the executive team, and we are very thankful for his contribution.”

Simon Woodhead, LINX Chairman

Adding Value and Creating Opportunities

2018 was a landmark year where technical innovation, changes in governance and a focussed marketing strategy combined to enhance LINX’s position as a world leading Internet Exchange Point. On the network side the disaggregated LON2 network infrastructure was introduced with all members migrated seamlessly.

LINX added 141 new 10GE ports and 40 new 100GE ports across all the LINX exchanges during 2018. One of these 100GE ports was the second such port to go live in Manchester, which is very encouraging and a sign of the growth we have seen across all LINX networks.

Also in the report LINX Chief Finance Officer, Malcolm Holt, gave a overview of LINX’s financial position. Despite cuts to the prices of LINX services, LINX managed to maintain its revenue levels and contain expenditure growth and this resulted in the reporting of a small surplus. As a not-for-profit member run organisation this puts LINX position for 2019 and beyond.

In summary LINX Chief Executive Officer, John Souter, reflected on a great 12 months for LINX but also looked ahead to some exciting new projects.

“I would like to say how proud I am of our staff, and the great commitment that they show to serving a membership organisation such as LINX. They have enthusiastically embraced an agile way of working across almost everything that they do, and I see improvement projects underway in almost every aspect of working life at LINX. Long may it continue!”

John Souter, LINX Chief Executive Officer

Download 2018 Annual Report
May 29 2019
0

LINX Announces CEO’s Retirement and Names Successor

By | General, International, LINX News, News

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) announced today that their long-standing CEO, John Souter, has announced his intention to retire at the end of 2019. John has served as LINX CEO for the last 18+ years, whilst the exchange point has grown from around 100 to the 885 ASNs that are connected today.

Current CMO, Kurtis Lindqvist, has been confirmed as his successor. In announcing his impending retirement, John said: “It has been a great privilege to hold this position for so long in such an important part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. The time has come to pass on the baton to someone new, to lead LINX to even greater success in the future. I would like to thank our members, our staff and Board for their support over the years, and for the great joy of working with them to develop LINX in the way that we have.”

Simon Woodhead, the Chairman of LINX said: “Any CEO wants to leave a business in a better shape than they found it, and any leader’s legacy is the culture and team they have built. John Souter has been tremendously successful in both respects, and has been a constant steady hand at the helm through a period of incredible change. John dedicated himself to LINX and the wider community and on behalf of both I wish to thank him for everything he has done and been. I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him.” Simon Woodhead announced John’s successor in a statement to LINX members at their LINX105 quarterly member meeting on 29th May 2019: “I am delighted announce that we have appointed Kurt Erik (Kurtis) Lindqvist (the current CMO of LINX) to succeed John as CEO. They will work together in a handover relationship in the coming months, with Kurtis formally taking over in mid-September 2019. John will then step back into a supporting role, prior to his formal retirement from the business at the end of December 2019.”

”Kurtis Lindqvist said: "I am very honoured to have been selected as the next CEO for LINX. Under John's leadership, LINX has become recognised as the worlds leading membership Internet Exchange and seen a tremendous growth. John has built a fantastic team at LINX and I look forward to leading LINX and the team, at a time when the interconnection market is changing."