iomart has announced a significant capital investment in Cisco routing technology to ensure its network can meet the growing demand for capacity as the growth in Internet traffic continues.

iomart has installed two Cisco ASR 9912 Routers to future proof against the high data demand it expects to be placed on its network by customers, putting it on a par with some of the big Internet transit carriers. The new routers give iomart 4x as much port density. Increasing switch port density boosts network performance by allowing simultaneous transmissions of data and increasing the bandwidth or volume of information that can be transferred.

The Cisco ASR 9912 Routers support 10 line-card slots, with each slot capable of switching up to 2 Tbps of bi-directional traffic. In its first phase, the system will support 4+1 fabric cards allowing 550 Gbps of non-redundant (440 Gbps redundant) switching capacity.

One router has also been moved out of London to an Internet Exchange point in Slough to ensure greater resilience for iomart's network in the event of a major incident in the capital. The network improvement will allow iomart to peer directly with major European cities without the need to route traffic via London, resulting in reduced Internet latency on these routes.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart, says: 'This is another significant investment by iomart giving us the big network we need to meet the ever greater data demands of business. It will give us the capacity to carry huge amounts of traffic out to the Internet from our data centres. Few hosting companies of our size are making investments like this but we want our customers to know that it doesn't matter how much video, mobile or file data they are creating, we can handle it for them.'

As well as greater network capacity, the routers also give iomart the ability to absorb much larger amounts of attack data via its Arbor DDoS Peakflow platform and deliver clean traffic out to customers without affecting their services.

Richard McMahon, Group Head of Technical Operations for iomart, said: 'It's like having the latest Ferrari of the Internet world. These routers give us huge capacity and huge throughput to deliver our hosting services to customers with no risk of network failure.'

Last year we announced we had carried out the first major deployment of Cisco® Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) and Bi Directional (BiDi) Transmission technology to turn our newly expanded data centre in Maidenhead, one of ten we own and operate in the UK, into a truly software defined data centre.

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