Hurricane Electric extends global presence in Equinix

Equinix, Inc. has announced that Hurricane Electric is extending its global IPv4 and IPv6 network to Equinix International Business Exchange ™ (IBX®) data centres in Asia and Europe. This expands Hurricane Electric’s global footprint to a total of 17 IBX deployments in anticipation of rapid global Internet traffic growth and the widespread migration to IPv6 as the Internet of Things becomes fully realised.

While IPv6 traffic is currently just over four percent of global IP traffic, it has grown exponentially over the last few years. This trajectory will only accelerate as IPv4 addresses dwindle, leaving IPv6 as the only option for addressing the 40 billion Internet-connected devices projected to go online by 2020.

Global adoption of IPv6 varies worldwide with certain countries far ahead of others. Hurricane Electric stands to benefit greatly from its multiple global colocations through Equinix to support this migration. In particular, Germany has doubled its IPv6 penetration over the last six months, making Hurricane Electric’s latest Equinix deployments in Munich (MU1) and Frankfurt (FR5) timely.

In addition to Frankfurt and Munich, Hurricane Electric most recently deployed in Hong Kong (HK1), building onto its existing points of presence (PoP) in Chicago (CH1), Dallas (DA1), Los Angeles (LA1), New York (NY9), Paris (PA2), Seattle (SE2), Silicon Valley (SV1 and SV8), Singapore (SG1), Tokyo (TY2), Toronto (TR1), Washington, D.C. (DC2) and Zurich (ZH1).

Hurricane Electric and Equinix are leaders in Internet infrastructure. Hurricane Electric’s first IBX deployment was at SV1 in 2002, before the advent of smartphones and social media. Then, Internet traffic was 4,860 petabytes annually. Today, the Internet generates that traffic in roughly three days. With the emergence of the Internet of Things, infrastructure will need to scale to keep pace, considering that 57 percent of IP traffic is projected to originate from devices by 2018.

Since 2002, Equinix and Hurricane Electric have collaborated on growing the Internet: Equinix by promoting a higher density of networks and companies in its chosen data centre locations, and Hurricane Electric by providing those customers with lower latency and higher quality peering options in market. Each of Hurricane Electric’s IBX deployments was determined by Equinix’s ability to bring a high density of networks and Internet companies to a particular metro or region, providing a rich pool of potential customers for Hurricane Electric to serve with local market connectivity, reducing latency and improving cost per megabit.

· To reduce latency and optimise performance for a variety of Equinix customers, Hurricane Electric cross connects with more than 1,200 customers. As a result of Hurricane Electric’s extensive deployments across Equinix’s global footprint, it is a prime user of the Equinix Internet Exchange, home to more than 1,000 networks, content and cloud providers peering via an Ethernet switching fabric to gain network efficiencies.