Case Study: LINX achieves Olympic-ready capacity and 15% OpEx savings with Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks upgrades capacity of London Internet Exchange in time for the 2012 Olympics

LINX (the London Internet Exchange) faced rapid membership and traffic growth and needed to upgrade and future‑proof its peering infrastructure under the tight deadline of the 2012 London Olympics while preserving rock‑solid reliability. They chose Extreme Networks to deliver the upgrade, leveraging Extreme Networks BlackDiamond X8 core switches along with Summit X670 and Summit X460 access switches to scale capacity across LINX’s sites.

Extreme Networks deployed BlackDiamond X8s at five main datacentres, Summit X670/X460 at smaller sites, and provided day‑to‑day PSP monitoring and engineering support, plus 16×10Gb DWDM interconnects, enabling a seamless upgrade with no service incidents during the Olympics or Paralympics and better than 99.999% availability. The project reduced OpEx by 15% (savings passed to LINX members), allowed a member price cut for 2013, and future‑proofed LINX’s platform for continued traffic growth.

LINX

Derek Cobb

CTO