Who is Zenlayer?

Zenlayer is an edge cloud services provider and global company headquartered in Los Angeles, Shanghai, Singapore, and Mumbai. Businesses utilise Zenlayer’s platform to deploy applications closer to the users and improve their digital experience. Zenlayer offers edge compute, networking, and application delivery services in more than 160 locations on six continents.

How did you hear of NetIX?

Zenlayer’s team got to know NetIX and its network-enhancing services through attending many of the same industry events and conferences like GPF (Global Peering Forum), EPF (European Peering Forum), and NANOG (North American Network Operators Group). Because of the amount of industry events in common, Zenlayer reached out to NetIX to find out how they could benefit from deploying complementary services to its network.

The challenges:

Zenlayer started to notice an increase in their transit traffic going to Eastern and Central European networks. Concerned about maintaining both low costs and high network quality, Zenlayer reached out to NetIX.

Zenlayer required a flexible solution that would be able to scale with further demand. The solution would also need to access Eastern Europe through an existing Point of Presence (PoP) on their network. The closest PoP in Europe on Zenlayer’s backbone was Frankfurt, so this data centre location needed to be a key part of the solution.

The solution: 

NetIX has over 150 on-net data centres across their network. Many of these locations are in common with Zenlayer. Through one simple cross connect in a mutual on-net facility - Equinix FR5 in Frankfurt, Germany - Zenlayer was able to gain full access to NetIX’s entire portfolio of solutions and start deploying network-enhancing services.

NetIX’s Global Internet Exchange (GIX) solution takes advantage of the strong partnerships they have with all major Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). GIX blends all the routes available from all the IXPs’ peers and presents them to Zenlayer through just one port, via one cross connect on one contract. Zenlayer peers directly with key IXPs such as AMS- IX in the Netherlands, DE-CIX in Germany, and LINX in the UK, but through GIX, they were able to add and access more peering routes through other connected IXPs in Eastern Europe like NIX.CZ in the Czech Republic, Thinx in Poland, MSK-IX and W-IX in Russia, SOX in Serbia, and UA-IX in Ukraine.

The solution would rely on peering, which gives network operators greater control and visibility of what’s going on with their traffic so the engineers can make better, more informed decisions about their traffic routes and the future of their network.

The result:

Zenlayer immediately experienced benefits. Transit costs were reduced by deploying the GIX solution. Because it is handled predominantly via peering, traffic is kept local, reducing latency times. The solution also allows them to retain complete control of their network.

With GIX, Zenlayer was able to easily test serving Eastern Europe networks from their PoP in Frankfurt and observe NetIX could meet their strict performance criteria in terms of latency, packet loss, and throughput. GIX has enabled Zenlayer to see and compare traffic growth and justify investment before committing to build their own infrastructure and presence in Eastern Europe.

Read more about the Global Internet Exchange solution here!