2024: A year to remember!

As 2024 draws to a close, we at Zare would like to take this moment to reflect on a truly remarkable year. It’s been a year of growth, innovation, and milestones, all made possible by the unwavering support of our incredible customers. Whether you’ve been with us for a decade or just joined us this past month. Thank you for being an essential part of our journey.

This year also marked a major milestone for us, 10 years of Zare! What began as a small venture with our own micro data centre in Bristol with capacity for a mere 400 servers has transformed into a global operation spanning multiple countries. From those humble beginnings, our dream of operating a world-class network is now a reality, with points of presence in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Tokyo. It’s been an incredible ride, and we’re just getting started!

We accomplished a lot behind the scenes this year to enhance our infrastructure, expand our network, and deliver new capabilities to our customers. Here are some of the key highlights:

- Tokyo Deployment: We launched our first two cabinets in Tokyo, offering Intel and AMD bare metal solutions along with IP transit. This included connecting to the BBIX internet exchange to improve regional connectivity.
- Frankfurt Availability: After a good few years of roadblocks, servers in Frankfurt are now live and available for deployment!

- Higher Capacity: We upgraded all 10G backbone links to a minimum of 100G, reducing latency and increasing bandwidth across key routes, including London to Edinburgh / Glasgow, Edinburgh to Glasgow, Frankfurt to Zurich and Paris to Zurich.

- DDoS Mitigation: Our total DDoS protection capacity skyrocketed from 160Gbps to ~600Gbps with the deployment of Corero NTD1100 devices across multiple locations.

- Peering and Transit Enhancements: Key connections to Swiss IX and Era IX were upgraded to 100G interfaces, as well as bringing up additional PNI’s with Google and Meta in a secondary location ensuring better redundancy and performance. We also doubled capacity with Cogent, Arelion and GTT in London to a minimum of 200Gbps, and upgraded all our Cogent, Arelion and GTT links in all our EU locations to 100G interfaces too. Raising our total external capacity to 3.7Tbit!

- GPU Servers: We introduced GPU server options in London featuring the NVIDIA L4 GPU and AMD EPYC CPU, meeting growing demand for high-performance computing.

- WHMCS Reseller Module: After popular demand, we launched a WHMCS module that enables our re-seller customers to offer better access and visibility of their service to their clients.

- New Standards: All new Intel and AMD servers are now equipped with 10G ports as standard, retiring the 1G era. Additionally, new cabinets feature 2x100G uplinks for future proofing and better scalability.

- Power Upgrades: Various cabinets across multiple locations were upgraded to 3-phase power circuits, improving energy efficiency and supporting higher-density deployments.

Throughout 2024 we also achieved a new bandwidth peak of over 500Gbps in a single direction (excluding DDoS traffic) and forwarded more than 2 exabytes of data in total throughout the year. To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 100 million 20GB hard drives (which just so happens to be the capacity of the HDD within my first home computer, oh how times have changed), an astonishing achievement!

Last but not least, we'd like to talk about something closer to home within our home city of Bristol. We were thrilled earlier this year to join a new initiative launched by Bristol City Football Club and Eleven Sports Media to involve local companies as community partners. For the 2024-2025 football season Zare is a community partner for Bristol City FC! Should you ever find yourself at Ashton Gate stadium or tune in to one of their televised games, be sure to look out for the Zare logo floating around the stadium.

As we look back on 2024, we’re filled with gratitude and pride for what we’ve achieved together. From small beginnings to the path we're on of becoming a global leader in bare metal solutions, this year has been a testament to what’s possible with the right vision, determination, and support.

Onward to 2025!