Gulf-IX, the only neutral Internet exchange in the Arabian Gulf region, is housed in Gateway Gulf's premier data center, adjacent to the FLAG/Falcon and FOG Bahrain cable landing sites.
Complete Carrier Neutrality
The Gulf-IX Internet exchange and the Gateway Gulf datacenter which houses it are both entirely carrier-neutral, making them the only world-class Internet traffic exchange facilities in the region. Carrier neutrality is a critical feature of Internet exchange facilities, since it ensures a fully-competitive market for the layer-1 and layer-2 carrier services needed to move traffic in and out of the facility. This competitive market in the underlying wholesale services allows Internet access providers, content distribution networks, and value-added service providers operating in markets like voice, banking, data warehousing, and grid computing, to maximize their margins while relying upon the stability of multiple source services.
Internet Exchange Switch Fabric
The Gulf-IX Internet exchange is powered by a fully-redundant pair of Force-10 E600 switches, offering participants dual-connection at 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet ports on fiber, and 10/100/GigE ports on copper. The two switches are not fully separated, and have staggered maintenance windows, to ensure the maximum possible uptime for pairwise connections between peers who fully utilize the redundancy we offer. The status of the switches is monitored around the clock both by local NOC staff and by advanced automated health-checking software. In addition, the switch fabric is continuously monitored for layer-2 anomalies, signs of spanning-tree faults or attacks, and each port is MAC-address locked to minimize the possibility of participants inadvertently introducing loops into the layer-2 topology.
Looking-Glass and Route-Servers
Root Name Servers
Stratum-1 Time Source
Network Time Protocol
Participants
- Packet Clearing House
- Autonomica (I-Root)
- University of Southern California (B-Root)
- Neustar
Traffic
MRTG/RRDTool graphs of aggregate traffic on the exchange switches
Routes
Daily dump from the local looking-glass, perhaps with whois information summarized.