Earlier this year we announced "The Split", a migration towards a new platform and concept. Today we're proud to announce that this has been finalized. After countless of hours working with fibers, transceivers, sensitive equipment and pending tickets, we have installed all required components and fully migrated members. One of the hardest parts of a migration and renumber is the coordination towards the members. Thankfully we have close relations with our customers, as this allowed us to do migrations quick and smooth.

Why a new platform?

We launched ERA-IX in just Q2 2022, our approach and service level seemed to be fueling our success. This is something that we didn't really anticipate back then, our V1 platform was perfectly capable handling this traffic. However, we believe innovation and change is important, it's one of the reasons we started ERA-IX. During the growth of ERA-IX, we slowly introduced more features and products, like L2 transport, IP transit and paid peering. We started to re-market our platform as a fabric, because it simply offered more than just a traditional internet exchange. The goal of this fabric is to be a one-stop-shop, to get all your network related services over one cross-connect. Of course there is also a competition part, mainly the newer 400G offerings by our direct competitors. With this new platform we can counter with much more cost-effective 400G offerings, thanks to our efficiency, automation and honesty.

What are the technical differences?

The new switches are built on VoQ architecture, ensuring deterministic packet forwarding, especially when packets are traversing speed-changes on our platform. We're now also able to deliver multiple services on cross connect with (on our end) 100% logical separation between the services meaning additional services will cause no adverse effects to the peering LAN and vice-versa. The switches we deployed are Arista 7280R3 series devices, selected for their versatility, efficiency and our vast experience with the Arista platform.

Power efficiency of the platform will still be unrivaled, as we size our switches appropriately to each location, meaning we consume no more power than absolutely necessary. Post migration, our total platform power, across all POPs is at ~2.5kW continuous, while supporting almost 10 Tbps of members across more than 10 locations.

What about upgrades?

Due to the availability of 400G in our platform, we have successfully tested and upgraded 400G transmission on our backbone links Having 400G backbone capacity between datacenters improves effectiveness and scalability.

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