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Press Release -- August 17th, 2023
Source: AMS-IX
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Upgrades at AMS-IX result in 85% power reduction

Ruben van den Brink

CTO

August 11, 2023

AMS-IX, the world leading Internet Exchange, announces today that they have successfully introduced new customer facing switches at Equinix AM5, one of its data center locations in Amsterdam. Due to the upgrades, the platform at AM5 now has increased port capacity, and power consumption at Equinix AM5 has been reduced by a significant 85%.

Last year, AMS-IX has chosen Juniper as its new switch supplier and, since then, has been preparing for a technology refresh of the platform. The AM5 datacenter at Equinix is the first of the sixteen Internet Exchange locations in the Netherlands where equipment has been replaced. Nikhef/ DRT AMS9, Global Switch and the DRT datatower are scheduled for upgrades later this year.

The introduction of new technology came with significant performance improvement. After the migration, the data center location at Equinix has more port capacity, supports the 100G LR-1 standard, and supports 400G ports. Moreover, the power consumption of the customer facing switches at Equinix AM5 has been significantly reduced, from 52.8 kilowatts to 8.2 kilowatts, representing an 85% decrease.

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Photo: a celebrating engineering team

The MLX switches at Equinix AM5, which were replaced, had been in operation for about twelve years. It is expected that the new Juniper switches will have a similar lifespan.

AMS-IX plans to equip all its locations with measuring equipment to determine the exact power consumption of each location. Equinix AM5 is the first location where this has been implemented.

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“It is always challenging to predict how much energy you will save by introducing a new technology platform, but this result exceeded our expectations,” says Ruben van den Brink, CTO of AMS-IX. “We want to give sustainability a more prominent role in our decision making. In general, the industry mainly considers what equipment can do, what it costs, and what its safety features are. Power consumption and sustainability should equally be taken into account when we onboard and introduce new technology.”

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