Open-IX Goes Global With AMS-IX Certification in Amsterdam

Amsterdam Internet Exchange, currently the world’s second-largest internet exchange by volume of traffic passing through it, has received Open-IX certification.

Open-IX is a relatively new organization that has devised a set of uniform certification requirements for internet exchanges and data centers that host them. Until now, it has been focused on the U.S. market, and the certification of AMS-IX in Amsterdam is the first one outside of the U.S.

Open-IX was started by a group of carriers, data center providers, and internet giants, including Google, Netflix, and Akamai. The group’s goal has been to bring more options to the U.S. peering market, dominated by Equinix and, to a lesser extent, Telx and CoreSite.

The organization promotes a distributed exchange model, where a single exchange can span multiple data centers in a metropolitan area, so all tenants in those data centers can make peering agreements with each other.

Several European exchange operators have recently expanded to the U.S. market, and many of the U.S. peering points they have established have been Open-IX-certified.

AMS-IX is one of those operators. It has set up a metro exchange across five data centers in New York and New Jersey and another one in the San Francisco Bay Area, spanning data centers in San Francisco and San Jose.

Other European operators to have entered the U.S. market recently are major AMS-IX competitors in Europe: DE-CIX (Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange), and LINX (London Internet Exchange). Both have received Open-IX certification for their American peering points.

In fact, new exchanges launched in the U.S. by European operators are the only ones that have Open-IX certification, according to the organization’s website. This may change soon, as certification for Florida Internet Exchange is currently pending.

The newly certified Amsterdam Internet Exchange is distributed across 11 data centers in the greater Amsterdam area. Job Witteman, AMS-IX CEO and co-founder, said the certification may serve as a signal to its peers to do the same.

“This achievement sets a precedent for other global exchanges to become Open-IX certified and drive higher worldwide technical and operating standards for IXPs,” he said in a statement.