Linode has completed initial Internet capacity upgrades in all facilities. All of our datacenters are now multihomed with several tier-1 transit providers and the largest peering exchanges in the world. This marks a milestone in Linode’s history: we now manage our own true service provider network, allowing us to deliver robust and reliable connectivity.
To accomplish this, our datacenters have been upgraded with Cisco ASR 9000 series edge routers, allowing us to scale to many terabits of capacity per datacenter. Currently, each datacenter has a few hundred gigabits of transit and peering, with more to come. We’re operating our network under ASN63949.
Why is this a good thing?
- We are now completely independent to make routing decisions, allowing us to quickly route around trouble on the Internet in real time.
- We’ve increased IP capacity to each facility by 5 to 10 times over our previous capacity amounts.
- We have high capacity edge routers and self-lit fiber backhauls in carrier hotels providing many terabits of additional expansion capabilities. Since we are our own backhaul provider, bringing up additional capacity between locations is fast and easy.
- We can do cool stuff in the future like inter-dc connectivity, per-customer VLANs, and Anycast announcements of some or all of our IP space.
Let’s take a look at the state of each datacenter:
Dallas
Retrofitted: July 25, 2016
Transit: Telia, NTT, Cogent, Zayo (soon: GTT, Tata)
Peering: Dallas Equinix Internet Exchange
We chose 1950 Stemmons and 2323 Bryan Street, two major regional carrier hotels, as our points of presence in Dallas. Also known as The Infomart, 1950 Stemmons is one of the largest buildings in Dallas, measuring at over 1.5 million square feet. Power and connectivity are plentiful at the Infomart; the building has four diverse power feeds and 100+ carriers redundantly built into the building.
Fremont
Retrofitted: September 23, 2016
Transit: Telia, Hurricane Electric, Cogent (soon: NTT, GTT, Tata)
Peering: San Jose Equinix Internet Exchange (soon: Any2 Los Angeles)
While there are several good options for points of presence in the Bay Area, we decided on 11 Great Oaks and 55 S Market, two large facilities with great carrier diversity. These are our longest fiber spans, requiring amplification in order to take a trip under the San Francisco Bay.
Atlanta
Retrofitted: September 21, 2016
Transit: Telia, NTT, Cogent, Zayo (soon: GTT, Tata)
Peering: Atlanta Telx Internet Exchange
In Atlanta we chose a single facility, 56 Marietta, to serve as our regional point of presence. This well-known carrier hotel was selected over all the other options in the Atlanta metro area simply because no other facilities could compete with Marietta’s connectivity. To ensure total physical redundancy, our diverse dark fiber enters 56 Marietta through different building entrances and lands in separate meet-me rooms using entirely distinct power systems.
Newark
Retrofitted: August 1, 2016
Transit: Telia, NTT, Cogent, Zayo (soon: GTT, Tata)
Peering: NYIIX, DE-CIX New York
In Newark, we chose to light points of presence in 165 Halsey and 111 8th Avenue, both famous carrier hotels in the NJ/NY metro area. We selected 165 Halsey in particular to give us physical diversity from the island of Manhattan. Having our physical footprint spread out over the entire New York metro area makes us much less susceptible to downtime during a catastrophic event like Superstorm Sandy.
London
Retrofitted: July 11, 2016
Transit: Telia, NTT, Cogent (soon: GTT, Tata, Vodafone, Sparkle)
Peering: LINX, AMS-IX, LONAP
In London, we chose 8/9 HEX and 14 Coriander Avenue to light points of presence. Because of the stature of these facilities and the more friendly peering climate in Europe, we are able to directly connect with hundreds of major networks over the largest Internet exchanges in Europe. This allows us to route up to 50% of our traffic over peering instead of transit, providing our customers with the shortest paths and lowest possible latencies to many of the largest European networks.
Singapore
Retrofitted: N/A
Transit: Telstra, PCCW, Tata (soon: NTT)
Peering: Singapore Equinix Internet Exchange
Tier 1 networks in the South Asian transit market are much more siloed than in other parts of the world, making it difficult to provide good connectivity using any single provider. This presented an unforeseen challenge when launching this facility in 2015: for the first time, we needed to be truly multihomed. With this realization, we decided to delay Singapore so that we could install our first pair of Cisco ASR 9000s as edge routers and launch on what would become our global public ASN. The facility we chose for Singapore is well connected, obviating the need to light dark fiber to remote carrier hotels.
Frankfurt
Retrofitted: N/A
Transit: Telia, Cogent (soon: GTT, Tata, Vodafone, Sparkle)
Peering: DE-CIX Frankfurt
Building on the experiences learned in Singapore, we now had a blueprint for all future Linode facilities. Choosing a colocation facility now considers how many quality networks are available to us, including in the colo facility itself. The Frankfurt datacenter is extremely well connected and we did not need to light dark fiber into remote carrier hotels.
Tokyo 2
Retrofitted: N/A
Transit: NTT, Tata, PCCW (more to come)
Peering: BBIX
We’re opening a brand new Tokyo facility next month. This will enable customers in the region to take advantage of several recent Linode announcements: KVM hypervisor, our latest plan specs including double the RAM and SSD servers, and mass availability. Stay tuned for the announcement within the next few weeks.
Filed under: announcements by Dan Spataro