Customer Profiles

Leading U.S. Colocation and Interconnection Provider Leverages Force10 Ethernet Switching and Carrier Solutions to Power its Innovative Service Expansion

For providers of interconnectivity and related services, such as Internet peering, success is not simply defined by providing customers with state-of-the-art facilities or the greatest number of available service provider choices.

For New York City-based Telx, success has been achieved by proactively responding to customer needs with innovative solutions that enable the company’s customers to provide highly reliable and cost-effective services to their respective customers or staff.  This success has led to a consistently growing customer base that numbers more than 700 leading telecommunications carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), content providers and enterprises making more than 27,000 connections in aggregate across their respective verticals.

For an inherently demanding business in a highly competitive market to be able to consistently and successfully provide value-added services to its customers, the process must be viewed not as a challenge, but as an opportunity, according to Rose Klimovich, vice president of product development and product management at Telx.

“When we’ve considered implementing new peering, or value-added services, Force10 Networks has been a consistent network partner for the past several years because of their ability to consistently deliver technically advanced, cost-effective solutions that contribute to our reputation as a trusted provider of these services,” Klimovich says.

Telx and Force10 initially began their long-time relationship as Telx developed an innovative solution in response to international service providers who were looking to connect SONET and SDH networks. For customers who wanted to save on capital and get quick time to market, the Telx the Virtual Xchange service offered virtual multiplexing and virtual interconnection services, including SONET-SDH circuit conversion. Telx selected the Force10 Traverse® Multiservice Transport Switch to power this service, which is the only such solution to offer all of these services, including international gateway conversion capabilities at rates ranging from E1-to-T1 up to OC-192-to-STM-64.

Armed with this functionality, Telx’s service provider customers are able to reduce costs and streamline the process of interconnecting with diverse long-haul and local transport networks. In addition, they can quickly and virtually cross connect from one provider to another using software, again without additional investment by the service provider.

Leveraging 10 Gigabit Ethernet for Next-Generation Peering Services
As bandwidth demands exploded due to Web 2.0 applications, such as online gaming, on-demand video and social networking, ISPs needed to reliably and cost effectively increase their traffic capabilities. Telx responded by offering its Telx Internet Exchange (TIE). TIE is a managed Internet exchange, providing a high-performance Internet peering fabric that enables customers to reduce operating costs by aggregating ISPs, content providers, enterprises and others on a single, highly available service platform so that Internet traffic may have direct access to destination networks. By eliminating IP transit providers, customers can gain further profitability for services and better performance for applications.

To deliver these peering services, Telx chose the high-density Force10 C300 resilient switch. Port density is always among the top concerns for businesses like Telx since it enables a greater number of their TIE customers to connect to each other. Consequently, by taking advantage of high port-density switches, companies are able to provide the greatest amount of bandwidth without requiring additional networking equipment—and the additional footprint that comes with them.

Supporting up to 384 line-rate Gigabit or 64 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) ports in a single chassis, the C300 delivers the speed, capacity and density Telx needs to accommodate the growing bandwidth demands of its TIE participants. In addition to the non-blocking density, Telx depends on the reliability of the C300, which ensures line-rate performance regardless of traffic conditions and brings predictability to the infrastructure. By deploying at C300s in their Atlanta, Dallas, New York and Phoenix data centers, Telx has also found that this port density has resulted in reduction of power use by approximately 1/3 of what would normally be used for this application.

Efficient, Dedicated Internet Access Services
Also, to provide dedicated Internet services for customers, Telx deployed Force10 S-Series access switches at data center facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, New York, Clifton, N.J., and San Francisco. By providing resilient connectivity from low speed to 10 GbE at the network edge, customers can cost effectively leverage the S-Series to provide dedicated bandwidth to power both small applications and large Web sites.

Since Telx wanted to continue to simplify the management of its platforms, it made sense to deploy the C- and S-Series Ethernet switches since they both run on the modular Force10 operating system, FTOS. Leveraging online monitoring and diagnostics tools that work on both switch lines, Telx can more easily troubleshoot devices without bringing them down, which reduces management costs. FTOS further increases manageability with configuration rollback that eliminates downtime due to human error and MAC learning limits.

“Deploying Force10 solutions over the years have put us in a good position to offer the value-added services that our customers need,” says Klimovich. “It’s a real benefit for us to have these services moving forward.”

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