News

100 User Milestone Passed in Style

130 IXPs globally are now Powering Peering with IXP Manager, making it the largest and most used peering platform in the world. These IXPs incorporate 7,561 individual switch ports peering over the IXP Manager platform around the world, delivering a total connected capacity exceeding 73 Terabits/sec. There are 3,720 unique networks connected to the 130 IXPs with an aggregate peak traffic in excess of 15 Tbit/s. 

The IXP Manager project began at INEX, Ireland’s peering point, in 2007, with the aim of developing a robust, secure and scalable platform to manage the internet exchange. In 2013, IXP Manager was released under an open source licence and made available to IXPs around the world. 

“The entire team is incredibly proud that the platform which emerged from INEX’s commitment to deliver world-class IXP services is enabling the creation and growth of IXPs and peering services in over 63 countries around the world”, said Nick Hilliard, CTO of INEX. “That the platform would one day scale to nearly 8,000 connected ports and 73Tbit/s of connected capacity is far beyond our initial dreams for this project.

“As the platform has matured, it has delivered extensive technical and organisational benefits to INEX, enabling robust, secure and resilient scaling of the exchange with existing resources. It is testimony to the support of INEX members in making IXP Manager a free-to-use open source project that these same benefits are enabling peering at world-class standards at so many IXPs around the globe.”

INEX continues to lead and develop IXP Manager and is grateful for the support of industry patrons and IXP sponsors that are committed to the aims of the project. Current industry patrons of IXP Manager are Internet Society, Facebook, CIRA and APNIC with Netflix as a patron from 2017 to 2019. Current IXP sponsors are Stockholm IXP (Sweden), INX.ZA (South Africa), NAMEX (Italy), GRIX (Greece) and InterLAN IX (Romania) with SwissIX (Switzerland) and Norwegian Internet Exchange (Norway) both sponsored the project from 2017-2019. 

Barry O’Donovan, head of development for the IXP Manager project, commented “Our vision for IXP Manager and the basis for making it a free-to-use, open source project was that it might enable the creation of IXPs wherever they are required. The existence of these IXPs would, in turn, create a stronger, open, more robust and better connected internet. It’s fantastic that this is now happening with the IXP Manager platform at well over 100 IXPs around the world. 

“We’re especially proud that IXP Manager helps these IXPs start from the best place possible: secure by default, proven configurations and implementing best practice. When a large network looks at a new exchange and sees that it runs IXP Manager, it fast-tracks the decision process for joining as they will know that the IXP already meets many of its key criteria and is adhering to industry best practices.”

In August 2020, the IXP Manager team undertook an extensive review to identify all IXP users of the platform around the world. This review revealed more than 30 additional IXPs, than were previously known, were found to be using the platform. A link to the statistics and the process for the review is available here. 

IXP Manager is Powering Peering at the following IXPs

IXP Manager is supported by the following Patrons and IXP sponsors