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Acceptable Use Policy
Equinix Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

Equinix has a stringent anti-spam policy, and customers are not allowed to use any portion of the Equinix PAIX peering fabric or Equinix's website to distribute unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (commonly known as "spam"). The customer pages on the Equinix website are designed to facilitate the establishment of potential peering relationships or to solicit the services of other customers only; the use of the information contained on these pages to distribute spam is specifically forbidden.

Effective June 1, 2009
PAIX / Equinix: Acceptable Use Policy for Traffic

The Equinix Network Engineering team reserves the right to disable ports that violate the rules listed below. Equinix will provide notice to customers of any violation of these rules.

To ensure smooth operation of the Equinix infrastructure we impose a set of restrictions on what kind of traffic is allowed on the various VLANs provided on the PAIX fabric. The majority of the following are standard industry practices currently implemented by many of the existing IX providers worldwide. This page gives a summary of those restrictions.

Sections
1. Unicast Peering VLAN
2. Multicast Peering VLAN
3. VoIP Peering VLAN
4. Active Cross Connect VLAN

1. Unicast Peering LANs

1.1 Physical Connection

1.1.1 Interface settings

Ethernet interfaces operating at speeds of 1000 mbps or lower attached to Equinix ports must be explicitly configured with speed, duplex other configuration settings, i.e. They should not be auto-sensing.

1.1.2 802.3ad Link Aggregation (LACP)

LACP is supported on the LAG interface for customers with two or more ports aggregated together.


1.2 MAC Layer

1.2.1 Ethernet Framing

The Equinix infrastructure is based on the Ethernet II standard. This means that LLC/SNAP encapsulation (802.2) is not permitted. For more information on the differences, see the Ethernet FAQ, question 4.1.

1.2.2 Ether Types

Frames forwarded to Equinix ports must have one of the following ether types:
----0x0800 - IPv4
----0x0806 - ARP
----0x86dd - IPv6

1.2.3 One MAC Address per Port

Frames forwarded to an individual Equinix port shall all have the same source MAC address. Equinix uses learning limits on peering ports to enforce this restriction.

1.2.4 No Proxy ARP

Use of proxy ARP on the router's interface to the fabric is not allowed.

1.2.5 Unicast

Frames forwarded to Equinix ports shall not be addressed to a multicast or broadcast MAC destination address for the public peering VLAN except as follows:
----Broadcast ARP packets

1.2.6 Multicast

Equinix allows multicast on switch on a separate multicast VLAN. Multicast IPv6 Neighbor Discovery packets are allowed. Please note that this DOES NOT include Router Discovery, Router Advertisement or MLD packets.

1.2.7 No Link-local Traffic

Traffic for link-local protocols shall not be forwarded to Equinix ports.

Link-local protocols include, but are not limited to, the following list:
----IRDP
----ICMP redirects
----IEEE 802.3 Spanning Tree

Vendor proprietary protocols. These include, but are not limited to:
Discovery protocols:

----CDP
----EDP

VLAN/trunking protocols:
----VTP
----DTP

Interior routing protocol broadcasts (e.g. OSPF, ISIS, IGRP, EIGRP)
----BOOTP/DHCP
----PIM - Allowed only on the multicast peering VLAN
-------PIM-SM
-------PIM-DM
----DVMRP
----IPv6 ND-RA
----UDLD
----L2 keepalives

The following link-local protocols are exceptions and are allowed:
----ARP
---- IPv6 ND

1.3 IP Layer

1.3.1 No Directed Broadcast

IP packets addressed to Equinix peering VLAN's directed broadcast address shall not be automatically forwarded to Equinix ports.

1.4 IP Addressing

1.4.1 No-exports of the Equinix peering VLAN

IP address space assigned to the Equinix peering VLAN shall not be advertised to other networks without explicit permission of Equinix.

2. Multicast Peering VLAN

2.1 The same rules as above for unicast apply, but a few extra protocols are allowed:
----MSDP
----IPv6 multicast protocols (MLD)
----IGMP

3. VoIP Peering VLAN

3.1 Physical Connection

3.1.1 Interface Settings

Ethernet interfaces operating at speeds of 1000 Mbps or lower attached to Equinix ports must be explicitly configured with speed, duplex other configuration settings, i.e. they should not be auto-sensing.

3.1.2 802.3ad Link Aggregation (LACP)

LACP is supported on the LAG interface for customers with two or more ports aggregated together.

3.2 MAC Layer

3.2.1 Ethernet Framing

The Equinix infrastructure is based on the Ethernet II standard. This means that LLC/SNAP encapsulation (802.2) is not permitted. For more information on the differences, see the Ethernet FAQ, question 4.1.

3.2.2 Ether Types

Frames forwarded to Equinix ports must have one of the following ethertypes:
----0x0800 - IPv4
----0x0806 - ARP
----0x86dd - IPv6

3.3 Content

3.3.1 Allowed Traffic

Traffic forwarded must be related to VoIP signaling or payload traffic.

3.3.2 Prohibited Traffic

Traffic not related to VoIP traffic exchange is prohibited. The Equinix VoIP peering VLAN is not to be used for general IPv4, IPv6, or multicast peering.

4. Active Cross Connect VLAN

4.1 Physical Connection

4.1.1 Interface Settings


Ethernet interfaces operating at speeds of 1000 Mbps or lower attached to Equinix ports must be explicitly configured with speed, duplex other configuration settings, i.e. they should not be auto-sensing.

4.1.2 802.3ad Link Aggregation (LACP)

LACP is supported on the LAG interface for customers with two or more ports aggregated together.

4.2 MAC Layer

4.2.1 Ethernet Framing

The Equinix infrastructure is based on the Ethernet II standard. This means that LLC/SNAP encapsulation (802.2) is not permitted.

4.2.2 Q-in-Q

Equinix does not support frame extensions for VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.1ac).

4.2.3 Jumbo Frames

Jumbo frames up to size 9,012 bytes are supported on GigE and faster port speeds.