Recent presentations to previous NANOG meetings have shown us some of the historical insights gathered by the experienced crowd at some of the U.S.-based exchanges. We in a way intend to follow up on that topic, by illustrating the more recent developments that the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) has gone through, in its attempts to address the never-ending demand for bandwidth that AMS-IX, like many others, is facing.

We will discuss and illustrate the various substantial platform changes that this IX went through in the past months, particularly focusing on one indispensable new platform element that was introduced recently: the optical switch. The insertion of optical switches into our main infrastrucure has enabled us to migrate our whole platform, including a complete architectural makeover, without ever imposing any substantial downtime on our customers.

About the Presenter
Romeo Zwart joined the Amsterdam Internet Exchange in January 2001 as a member of the AMS-IX technical team, which is in charge of day-to-day operations of the exchange, and also responsible for services design and longer-term development of the AMS-IX platform. Before joining AMS-IX, Romeo worked for several years with AT&T and AT&T Wireless, with a focus on IP telephony and 3G wireless architecture. Romeo started his career in the mid 1980's at the Academic Computer Center of Amsterdam, where he became involved operationally in the academic Internet community in the Netherlands.