It's been a busy time for German Internet exchange company DE-CIX. While it is suing the government for mass surveillance, and changing its CTO from Daniel Melzer to Thomas King, it has also been at work on its largest infrastructure relocation yet.

The company migrated more than 450 customers from Frankfurt 7, a Level 3 data center, to Frankfurt 12, an Equinix and ITENOS data center.

In a process taking several months, DE-CIX shifted more than 40 percent of all the traffic going through the world's largest Internet Exchange to a new location on the Kleyerstrasse campus. 15 kilometers of fiber optic cable were laid in the process, with 4 Terabits of network capacity migrated in one night.

That a lot of cables

“This move bore a resemblance to open-heart surgery, as we had to migrate customers during live operations. We achieved this without encountering the slightest problem. We are the first Internet Exchange worldwide to use a so-called patch robot, which is pre-programmed to independently migrate customers' connections,” Harald Summa, CEO of DE-CIX, said.

“With this relocation and the latest technology, we are priming ourselves for further growth at DE-CIX in Frankfurt. Last year, our customers' data capacity in Frankfurt increased by more than 20 percent compared to 2016. We expect a further massive increase over the next five to ten years and are optimally set up for it.”

The company has named its patch robot Patchy McPatchbot and claims it is "the first fully automated patch robot at an IX ever." You can view it in action in the video below.