Cloud Connection Centers Go Beyond Colocation

Companies considering a relocation of their IT assets from local data centers to colocation facilities have a new option to consider. It’s the Telx Cloud Connection Centers. Let’s have a look at what you can get in a cloud connection center that is above and beyond traditional colocation or carrier hotel services.

Traditional colocation offers cost savings and service enhancements based on economy of scale. The idea is that one larger environmentally controlled, highly secure and well connected data center is more efficient than hundreds or thousands of stand alone private data centers that have to meet the same requirements. This certainly makes sense. A server in your rack may be the same as the server in the colo rack, except they host hundreds or thousands of them. The backup generators at the colocation center aren’t hundreds or thousands of times larger or more expensive than the one you have in its own building out back. Nor is the fire suppression equipment, HVAC, or 24/7 staffing.

The other advantage that you find in colocation centers is connectivity. There is no way that multiple carriers are going to move into your company just to give you the option of connecting with them. They do just that at the colo. Carriers love to set up shop in colocation centers because they know that there are plenty of potential customers needing high bandwidth WAN connections. Once established, all that is needed is a simple cross connect to connect users and carriers.

In itself, this is a good reason for you to move to a colocation center. Even if you are perfectly happy with your infrastructure and technical staffing costs, how easy is it to get bandwidth? Well located business have many options to choose from. Companies that have built off the beaten path may find that fiber optic services are hard to come by or very expensive to bring in. There’s a strategic advantage in moving your high performance servers and bandwidth demanding public facing applications to a colocation facility. You can then use more modest bandwidth to communicate with your server farm.

Telx takes this to the next level with their Cloud Connection Centers. Telx is a major player in colocation services and carrier connectivity. This year, they’ve started offering a new service called cloudXchange that is a global community of providers and users of cloud services. Members colocate within the Telx facilities. Telx provides the cross connects and other interconnections to link users and providers.

Isn’t the whole idea of the cloud that it is “somewhere, out there” and you save money by buying cloud services on pay as you go basis instead of managing your own equipment? For smaller companies, especially those who don’t want to deal with technicalities, that’s a model that works. Larger organizations have found problems with this simplistic model. A big problem is latency and bandwidth in connection to the cloud. Other issues include the need for private as well as public clouds to ensure security and performance while reducing costs.

The whole movement to the cloud has become so important that Telx has rebranded their 15 colocation and connection centers as Cloud Connection Centers. Within those centers, you have easy access to cloud computing, storage and Software as a Service (SaaS) resources. You have an almost infinite array of options from running your own equipment to completely outsourcing to cloud vendors and any mix in-between.

How strong is this trend to everything in the cloud? Strong enough that Telx is breaking ground on a brand new 215,000 square foot data center in Clifton, N.J. to complement their existing Clifton facility and their New York City center at 60 Hudson St. A private fiber ring will connect 60 Hudson and Clifton to minimize latency.

Are you in the midst of doing private vs public vs hybrid cloud tradeoffs against traditional colocation and operating your own private data center? This would be a good time to explore additional options offered at a Cloud Connection Center to complete your cost/benefit analysis.

Telx Cloud Exchange Reduces Service Lag Time

The idea behind cloud services is that you can shut down your local data center and rent everything you need in the way of infrastructure, platform and software from a service provider somewhere out there. You’ll save a ton of money and the users will never know the difference. Except some of them do notice a difference. Things can bog down in the cloud.

How can that be? One premise of cloud computing is that there is a near infinite well of resources to draw from. You need more processing, you bring it online almost instantly. You need more disk storage, you take it. After all, there is plenty to go around. So how can responses that were snappy when the data center was in the basement become sluggish when the same facilities are in the cloud?

It all comes down to connectivity. Everybody knows that electrical signals move at the speed of light, right? You might guess that’s so fast that it shouldn’t make any difference if the wire is a hundred feet long or a thousand miles. At the speed of light a human can’t possibly detect the travel time of electrical impulses over wires and fiber optic cables. That’s right, isn’t it?

It sure sounds nice in theory, but in practice the speed of light isn’t infinite and the speed of communication signals never gets near light speeds anyway. Remember that the speed of light so often quoted is in a vacuum. That’s 186,000 miles per second when your laser beam is shooting through space. On terrestrial circuits, 186,000 miles per second translates to 186 miles per millisecond or 10 milliseconds for 1,860 miles. Those signals can’t even go that fast because any medium slows them down. You’ll be lucky to go 2/3 as fast, or a millisecond for every 124 miles.

Are we forgetting something? You bet. There’s no such thing as communicating over one long strand of pure wire or fiber. There’s circuitry at both ends and amplifiers, regenerators, add-drop multiplexers and other equipment in-between. Those will add milliseconds or tens of milliseconds more.

That’s still nothing compared to what happens when packets are routed on the Internet. They get from point A to point B alright. But they seldom go in a straight line. They go from router to router to router to router and eventually to the destination. There’s no guarantee the next packet will take the same route as the last one. There’s also no guarantee that the packet will even get there intact. Oh, one is missing? TCP/IP will resend it and all will be well. The file being transferred will certainly be intact at the other end, but how long did it take to replace all the lost packets and wait for traffic jams congesting certain nodes?

Cloud providers and companies sensitive to lag time, also known as latency, are taking a close look at colocation to have the shortest and most direct communications paths possible. A step beyond even standard colocation facilities is the new cloud exchange service from Telx. It’s branded cloudXchange and it may be the future of data centers.

Telx’s breakthrough comes in inviting cloud service providers to move in with them, literally. A service provider can locate their infrastructure in one or all 15 Telx facilities. What they gain is access to a wealth of carriers who have created point of presence within the Telx facilities and major corporations, content delivery networks and others who are just down the hall in the same building. For long haul connections, Telx has access to low latency fiber routes between data centers and to worldwide destinations.

This may be where we’re all headed. Instead of every company having its own server racks connected directly to the corporate LAN, most infrastructure will be outsourced to a cloud service provider or collocated in the same building to form a hybrid cloud. User connectivity will be over high speed dedicated lines, perhaps just to the nearest colo facility where service providers will have a portion of their infrastructure. A separate Internet access path will be available to browse the Web, share email with outsiders, and connect with consumers.

Are you a user or provider of cloud services who is unhappy with their networking connections? Perhaps you can benefit from an upgrade to higher bandwidth, lower latency connectivity to get rid of the lags that are plaguing your business processes.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons