Moscow Internet Exchange


MSK-IX is an Internet eXchange Point with headquarters in Moscow, Russia. With over 549 connected networks and 3,37Tbps of peak traffic, MSK-IX is one of the world's largest IXPs. According to the Internet Exchange Report by Hurricane Electric Internet Services, MSK-IX is the second in Russia and is one of the seven largest in the world by the numbers of members.
MSK-IX operates Internet eXchanges in 9 cities: Moscow, St.Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Stavropol, Samara, Kazan, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and maintains an access PoP in Riga. MSK-IX operates a distributed DNS platform, which provides authoritative name servers for the country-code top-level domains .RU and.РФ for Russia.

History

MSK-IX was founded in 1995 pursuant to the treaty signed by 6 Russian ISPs willing to reduce IP-traffic latency and international backhaul costs. The treaty assigned the Russian Institute for Public Networks as the administrator of the forthcoming IP-traffic exchange and defined technical requirements for connecting ISPs. The first MSK-IX PoP was established by RIPN at M9 facility on Butlerova st., 7. In 2001, MSK-IX became an autonomous organization. In 2002, MSK-IX joined Euro-IX, an international association of IXPs. State-run telecommunications company Rostelecom have acquired the majority of MSK-IX stock in 2015.

Technical platform

MSK-IX operates a distributed Ethernet-based switching platform spanning 38 PoPs in 10 cities. After the introduction of the "Dual Core" topology in Moscow in 2015, the total capacity of MSK-IX reached 8Tbps.
MSK-IX maintains a dedicated public peering VLAN at each of 9 metro areas and supports arbitrary private VLANs. Inter-city connections are provided on-net by MSK-IX and via partner ISPs. Common interface speeds are 1, 10 and 100G. The route-servers provided at each of MSK-IX public peering VLANs allow for routing policy control and DDoS blackholing by use of BGP communities.
The MSK-IX DNS Cloud is a distributed anycast DNS platform located in 7 federal districts of Russia, in Europe and in the Americas. It provides authoritative name servers for the country-code top-level domains .RU and.РФ for Russia.
In Moscow, MSK-IX operates M9.PLUS colocation space of 200 racks located at M9.

Professional community support

MSK-IX is a regular host and organizer of events for telecoms community.
On the occasion of its 10th anniversary in 2005, MSK-IX held its first Technical seminar. Reincarnated a year later as "MSK-IX Peering Forum", the event became a regular gathering of 500+ telecom professionals in Moscow with an agenda focused on network operations, security and peering.
In 2011, MSK-IX supported RIPE NCC in launching the ENOG conferences. As of October 2017, MSK-IX sponsored 6 and was serving as local host for 5 ENOG events.