Force10 Networks today announced that the Budapest Internet Exchange (BIX) has selected the E-Series switch/routers to provide highly reliable performance and unmatched scalability for its growing customer base of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telcos in Hungary and in Eastern Europe.

“As the largest Internet Exchange in Eastern Europe, we faced a 66% increase of Internet traffic per year in the recent years,” says Zoltan Kalmar, president of the BIX Committee. “The Force10 E-Series provided us with the non-blocking line-rate fabric we required in order to offer our customers highly reliable and predictable performance, while delivering the high 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) density that ensures we have the right network backbone in place to handle our ever-growing traffic needs in the future.”

Predictable Performance that European ISPs and Telcos Rely On

BIX initially installed a Force10 competitor’s higher capacity line cards on their existing switch/routers as a temporary solution to handle their increasing traffic needs. However, after speaking with other European Internet exchanges that used Force10 and evaluating the solutions themselves, engineers recognized that the E-Series solution would much more effectively support the more than 150 Gbits/sec worth of sustained traffic and the peak throughput of more than 300 Gbits/sec that they required. With support for 140 line-rate 10 GbE ports per chassis, the E-Series is the only switch/router that offers 100 Gbps of useable data capacity per slot today. In addition to capacity, the E1200 delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot.

Built for the Future

With its non-blocking throughput and large switching capacity, BIX was confident that its network infrastructure issues were solved. In addition to wanting to avoid the traffic congestion problem after Force10’s solutions were deployed, the exchange wanted to be able offer more 10 GbE ports to their customers. To provide that service and be prepared for future growth, BIX leveraged the E1200, which scales up to 1,260 GbE and 224 10 GbE ports per chassis with access control lists (ACLs) on all ports.

“Internet exchanges, as much as any other business, are adversely affected by inadequate or unreliable network performance,” says Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing, Force10. “The Force10 E-Series was purpose-built to deliver a reliable, high performance network as well as provide long-term investment protection in order to cost-effectively support the Web 2.0 applications that its customers must contend with.”