IXEurope launches IXLAN

IXEurope, Europe's fastest growing datacentre services group, is to launch IXLAN™ as part of its IXConnect™ family of products to enable IXDatacentre customers to connect to each other over state-of-the-art, high-performance and cost-saving Ethernet networks.

IXLAN™ is a monthly subscription-based product offering 10Mb, 100Mb, 1Gb and 10Gb ports. Customers connected are then able to buy and sell services to, or peer with, any other IXEurope customer connected to the same IXLAN™. Once connected, IXEurope customers have access to three networks: single IXDatacentre, national (multiple IXDatacentres in one country) and international (access to all IXDatacentres across Europe). In single-IXDatacentre solutions, customers benefit from access to a redundant Ethernet switch backbone. In national and international IXLAN™s customers also benefit from redundant inter-site networks.

"As an innovative and customer-focused company, IXEurope continues to develop new services as the market and our customer base evolves," said Guy Willner, CEO of IXEurope. "Over the past year, customers have become more sophisticated in the services they require to run their networks. With our new IXLAN™ service, customers are now able to access a much broader range of services beyond the offering of most single-network service providers. We have seen enormous interest as we start to implement the networks in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We believe that this innovation takes IXEurope to new levels of customer service excellence."

In 2001, a new customer base emerged : Hosting Service Providers, Managed Service Providers, Application Service Providers and Content Providers. Many of these companies built and ran their own IP, or internet technology-based, networks. However, many of these suppliers overestimated the amount of capacity they required, which led to cost over-runs and underused networks.

IXEurope helped customers by delivering IXIP™ - a multi-homed IP network service which provides a wide choice of networks over a single connection. With contracts running from just one month and fractional megabit commitments, customers could not only move quickly to market, but were also able to have sight of their network cost base prior to use. Furthermore, by utilising several IP networks and a redundant routing/switching platform, IXEurope has been able to offer an industry-leading 99.99% service level.

In 2004, IXEurope's enterprise-sector customer base started growing rapidly, now making up over 40% of its revenue. This customer base required different solutions, more and more focusing on building LAN, MAN and WAN products. These customers need access to secure, resilient services and IXEurope has helped them build and maintain these networks when all or part of the customer solution was located in an IXEurope Datacentre (IXDatacentre).

IXLAN™ goes one step further: Customers can now connect to the Layer 2, Ethernet network and communicate directly with other services available on the network. IXLAN™ starts with a high performance, redundant Layer 2 switching platform located in each IXDatacentre. Then, secure Layer 2 network services are attached between each IXDatacentre over two separate physical network paths. By managing all network traffic at the switching layer, network "hops" are kept to zero, meaning, customers in different IXDatacentres appear to be on the same LAN, vastly improving data transmission rates, and lowering costs and increasing volumes.