Good day and welcome to our second development update. In the previous update, we introduced this format to showcase new technical features and improvements at ERA-IX. In this second update, we are going to talk about our latest and exciting developments of the past months.
ARP Suppression
Since the founding of ERA-IX, our infrastructure is leveraging the latest BGP-EVPN technologies to provide a highly available and robust peering environment for our members. As of this week, we have updated our EVPN setup to handle known ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) and ND (Neighbor Discovery) requests on behalf of customer routers. This means your router can spend more time forwarding packets and less time responding to ARP requests. Our platform will automatically look for ARP requests on the peering LAN and answer them directly from the device you are connected to. This means lower latency for ARP replies and results in much less ARP flooding across the peering LAN.
We're proud to have this introduced here at ERA-IX, as this is a very unique IXP feature. Only really seen at the largest IXPs in the world like, for example, DE-CIX as of last month.
AS2AS (M2M) Update
In the previous Development Update, we also introduced a unique IX feature, called the Member 2 Member statistics. Using this feature it's very easy to see how much traffic you are doing with other members on the platform. We are now pushing the boundaries by further innovating this feature by introducing AS2AS Destinations.
We're renaming our Member 2 Member feature to AS2AS. With this rename, we also implemented Destinations, which provides more granular and unique insights into traffic destinations.
As you can see on the screenshot here, we have more insights about traffic traversing the platform for your ASN.
This will allow you to view to which ASN traffic is getting routed in the network of your peer. Offering you the ability to find new potential peers, find the root cause of traffic shifts and so much more!
This system relies on the prefixes being announced to our route server to resolve the ASN for the downstream traffic at your peers. Maintaining sessions with our route server is recommended for this purpose. Should you not want to export your prefixes to a specific member, you can use our route-server communities to enforce your BGP peering policy, even while peering with our route servers.
Expanding the platform
Not all updates are visible to our customers, however, we've been working behind the scenes to prepare our platform for expansion to new locations. It might look easy for an IX to add new data centers, but it requires careful preparation in terms of physical infrastructure and platform configuration. We will be announcing new locations in the upcoming weeks.
Stay tuned for Development Update 3!
