Equinix, Inc. has announced that Hurricane Electric is extending its global IPv4 and IPv6 network to Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers 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 realized.
"Hurricane Electric has seen a number of massive changes to Internet infrastructure over the years, and has negotiated this consistent need for rapid scalability through our data center strategy. Today, we are finally on the true cusp of a widespread migration to IPv6, which we have prepared for with our latest IBX deployments. We are live in 22 countries now, many through Equinix, and look forward to realizing our goal of being present in 100 countries by continuing to proliferate our offerings through strategic collocations," said Mike Leber, president, Hurricane Electric.
"Throughout our relationship with Hurricane Electric, we have seen waves of innovation begin in our data centers and become widely accepted. Over a decade ago, we introduced the Equinix Internet Exchange for peering, and together with Internet backbone providers like Hurricane Electric, we educated the market on its vital importance in the operation of the Internet. Today with the Equinix Cloud Exchange, we are witnessing a similar path of acceptance and support for our newest platform for performance optimization. We look forward to continuing to work with Hurricane Electric in helping them discover more customers as ours benefit from its breadth of connectivity options," said Jim Poole, vice president, services providers, Equinix.
While IPv6 traffic is currently just over 4% of global IP traffic, it has grown exponentially over the last few years.[1] This trajectory will only accelerate as IPv4 addresses dwindle, leaving IPv6 as the only option[2] for addressing the 40 billion Internet-connected devices projected to go online by 2020[3].
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[4], 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.[5] 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.[6]
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 center 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 optimize 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.