Fiber Optic Direct Connections To The Cloud

The Internet offers an extensive and cost effective means to access services in the cloud. What it doesn’t offer is consistent low latency, low jitter and high bandwidth performance. It was never intended to. The Internet’s claim to fame is universal connectivity. If your business processes in the cloud suffer from inconsistency or have become sluggish compared to when they were hosted onsite, you could benefit from a direct connection to the cloud.

One of the most popular cloud services is the Amazon AWS Cloud Computing Platform. Leveraging the enormous computing facilities owned by Amazon, users can pay as they go for application hosting, Web hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, enterprise IT applications and scalable database solutions. This nearly unlimited resource set can place a considerable load on typical bandwidth links used by corporations. It gets worse as you move more and more of your business processes to the cloud while leaving your employees in-place, often thousands of miles away.

The Internet works just fine for e-commerce, with thousands or millions of individual customers accessing centralized servers from their homes and offices. It’s also well suited for accessing company resources by remote workers and traveling employees. Where it starts to stumble is when you expect consistent real-time performance between the cloud and your data center or user base similar to what you get from hardwired connections in-house. The closest thing to your LAN is a high performance direct connection.

There are a couple of ways to achieve that direct connection. Amazon is currently offering direct connection to its cloud at Equinix’s Ashburn, VA and Silicon Valley, CA colocation facilities. Equinix provides colocation facilities for over 4,000 enterprises, cloud, content and financial companies through its network of colo centers. If you happen to have your equipment in their Ashburn or Silicon Valley facility, a simple cross connect is all that’s needed to hook your servers to Amazon’s.

If you are not collocated in an Equinix data center, you’ll need a WAN connection. AWS has two approved carriers that can make the connection. One is Level 3 Communications, a leading international fiber-based carrier with services to over 125 international markets. The other is AboveNet, Inc., another leading fiber optic carrier with 2.3 million metro fiber miles and connections in place to more than 450 data centers. AboveNet is offering connections to the AWS Direct Connect service at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

AWS Direct Connect network service works withe the same AWS services that you would otherwise access over the Internet. These include Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can use AWS Direct Connect to create multiple logical connections between your network and Amazon VPC. You can even establish multiple VPCs over this connection if you have enough bandwidth available.

AWS Direct Connect is flexible enough to scale your connectivity as your needs change. Each connection offers 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connectivity and you can add multiple connections to increase capacity. Amazon suggests that this approach is better than using VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.

Have you already moved to the cloud or anticipate such a move and are concerned that your current connectivity can’t get the job done? Perhaps a direct connection can give you the performance that you need. Get pricing and bandwidth options for fiber optic cloud connections now.

Data Center Services For You

Small to medium size businesses eye with envy the data centers owned by major corporations and carriers. But did you know that these same data center services are available to you at an affordable price?

The secret is to own only those assess that are strategic to your business and lease the rest. That includes data center services. You don't need the big secure building, the round-the-clock staff, diesel generators out back, and access to unlimited amounts of bandwidth. You can get all of those on a pay as you go basis.

But who's going to let your company share their data center? There are two types of data centers that will not only let you in, they are actively courting your business. The first is carrier operated colocation facilities. Competitive carriers need major facilities to act as points of presence or POPs in population centers. They need a physical presence to terminate their nationwide fiber optic lines and provide drops for Metro Ethernet and Metro SONET rings. Any city with a big concentration of businesses in a metropolitan area is ripe for a carrier POP.

The second type of business that wants you in their data center is the independent colo or colocation center, also called a carrier hotel. These are service providers who make their money by building a large well-equipped facility and spreading the cost over dozens or hundreds of customers. In any major population center there are many businesses like your own that are ready to move up to major data center services, but can't justify the capital and operating expenses.

What can you expect to find in a colocation center? There are usually a suite of services that scale to accommodate the smallest to the largest customers.

Everyone benefits from the general physical plant. That includes a temperature and humidity controlled environment, main and backup power supplies, fire suppression systems, and physical security to prevent unauthorized access. The plant is staffed 24/7 for technical and security support. Many times you can contract for IT support of equipment so that you don't need to show up in order to reboot a server at 2 AM. Some centers offer colocation hosting using servers that they own and operate. You simply have to install your own application software. They maintain the physical server and the operating system.

The footprint you need depends on how much equipment you plan to install at the colo. You might simply rent one or more servers. Or supply your own servers and rent rack space by the inch. The next step up would be a locking cabinet. The data center provides power, fan and cable drops. You provide the equipment and keep the cabinet key. Customers with larger needs order physical cages with 100 square feet or more of open space. The cage structure has a locking door and ladder racking above. Power and data cables are dropped in as required.

One of the major advantages of moving into a carrier or independent colo facility is access to almost unlimited bandwidth at the best prices available. The carriers are in the same facility and are generally connected to backbones with at least 10 Gbps of WAN bandwidth. They have the routers, switches and protocol converters to supply you with just about any form of voice or data that you need. That includes, T1, ISDN PRI, DS3, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, OC3, OC12, OC48, OC192 and Gigabit Ethernet. You may also be able to get SIP trunking, MPLS and even Frame Relay network access.

Bandwidth is bargain priced because of your close proximity to the carrier. In a carrier hotel, you might have access to services from several competing carriers. You pick the one that gives you the best deal and they'll drop a line to your cabinet or cage in the same building. Construction costs are free to minimal. That's quite different from being handed a multi-thousand dollar quote to trench fiber to your building on the outskirts of town. You might even be able to negotiate bandwidth on demand so that you can easily upgrade service with as little as a phone call.

Would your business benefit from major class data center services without the huge expense and operating headaches? If so, check out the colocation center services near your business location.