E-NNI Helps Ethernet Go Global

Metro Ethernet service has been growing by leaps and bounds. That’s not surprising, considering that Metro Ethernet services generally offer higher bandwidths at lower prices than traditional telecom services. They also offer features such as virtual private line and LAN service that weren’t previously available. As business appetite for Ethernet in the WAN grows, it’s only natural that businesses look to connect everywhere through their Metro Ethernet connections.

Metro Ethernet was intended to be just that. The "metro" in Metro Ethernet means metropolitan. It’s a service that is perfect for connecting two or more business locations within the same city or greater metropolitan area. The geographical range of coverage is set by the service footprint of the carrier providing the service.

Many competitive carriers now base their core networks on IP packet switching technology, not the traditional circuit switching architecture. They’ve embraced Carrier Ethernet to offer Ethernet services that span metropolitan areas so that companies can interconnect branches in cities across the country.

What’s been more difficult is getting the same type of universal access that companies have enjoyed with the Public Switched Telephone Network. After all, the days of monopoly in telecommunications are long gone. What’s needed is a standardized way for all those competing carriers to exchange traffic so that their customers can have a much wider geographical presence. Thats what E-NNI is all about.

The Ethernet External Network-to-Network Interface (E-NNI) is an industry standard ratified this year by the Metro Ethernet Forum. It provides a way for carriers to exchange traffic without having to worry about losing service features or having to create ad-hoc interfaces carrier by carrier. A separate UNI or User Network Interface connects each customer to its respective carrier.

The E-NNI specification makes it easy for carriers to exchange voice, data and video traffic at Ethernet layer-2. This make switched networks that span multiple carriers possible. To the user, the Ethernet WAN may look like one large cloud. To the service providers, it is a collection of clouds interconnected by peering through E-NNI connections.

The ratification of the E-NNI standard is giving rise to Ethernet Exchanges, such as Telx, that provide worldwide interconnection services for service providers at a carrier-neutral facility. Rather than having to build-out their service footprints to everywhere customers want connections or going through the laborious process of negotiating Private Ethernet NNI agreements, carriers can simply connect with each other through an Ethernet Exchange so that each participant has access to a much larger geographical footprint.

Can you company benefit from the growth of Carrier Ethernet and the many services it offers? The best way to find out is to get a competitive quote for your connection needs, be they across town or to the other side of the globe.

Business Booming For Telx Interconnection and Colocation

While many companies remain hunkered down and wringing their hands while they wait for the economy to improve, colo provider Telx is on a building boom at their premier data center in Chicago. What kind of sense does that make in recessionary America?

It makes lots of sense if you’re clued-in to what is transforming business and finance. It’s been a long time since accountants wore green eye shades and engineers worked slide rules. Most companies have adopted computer-based workstations connected to servers in the back room. This client-server architecture had a lot to do with increasing the speed of doing business and improving employee productivity in the last few decades. But now some of the savviest companies are adopting new methods and systems to give themselves an edge over their competitors.

Remember when the original justification for computerizing processes was elimination of paper? The “paperless office” became a joke as cheap laser printers and copiers spit out reams of paper faster than they could be hauled to the recycling bin. But when you consider how the speed and volume of transactions has increased, every desk should be piled to the ceiling and the aisles crammed full of paper documents. All the paper you don’t see is in the form of bits and bytes on hard drives spinning away inside your computer and in network storage within the data center. It’s turned out that less paper is the minor benefit of computerization. The big benefit is speed.

We simply do more faster. Companies don’t mail us product brochures anymore. We pull them up online. The time from identifying a need to researching solutions to placing an order has shrunk dramatically. It can all be done from the comfort of the desktop, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Need to coordinate team activities? Let them collaborate online so that those in Seattle can mark up documents for those in New York in real time.

Nowhere has the demand for speed become more dramatic than in the financial industry. You’ve heard of high frequency trading? These are complex algorithms running on high speed servers to electronically issue buy and sell orders to the markets. We’re at the point where milliseconds and even microseconds make a difference in trade profits. The Einsteinian limit of how fast light can move through glass and wire introduces a time delay between locations that simply can’t be reduced. So, how do you beat the competition? You get closer to the markets... physically closer. That’s what Telx provides. Its proximity to the exchanges and the buy-side and sell-side firms at Telx’s strategically collocated facilities. If the upper limit to your potential speed of transaction is a length of patch cord, you are in an advantageous position compared to the competitor hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Low latency colocation facilities near the action are essential for the most advanced players in high frequency finance. But there are other reasons for collocating with suppliers, customers and service providers. The cost of bandwidth is a good reason. With many competing carriers within arm’s reach, or at least down the hall, you’ve got access to the best rates per Mbps or Gbps and none of the expensive build-out costs of stringing wires or fiber cable for miles. If bandwidth is becoming one of your biggest expenses, moving to the colo facility can be a major cost saver. This can easily be the case if your product is video or high volume e-commerce or a popular application with millions of users.

Even smaller companies that aren’t located in a downtown sweet spot for low bandwidth prices may find that colocation gives them the advantage of keeping their physical location where it is but moving their bandwidth-hungry applications to where costs are lower. Cloud computing is another way to leverage the economy of scale in putting the software and servers where the bandwidth is cheapest and accessing the service from wherever you choose to be.

Does your company have demands for low latency or high bandwidth that would benefit from Telx or similar facilities? Are you just looking for ways to reduce your bandwidth costs? If so, you should take a look at the cost advantages of colocation and cloud computing services.

Telx Minimizes Latency WIth Colocation Near Carriers

If latency is important to your applications, you want to be as close as possible to your service providers. Why? Because no matter how fast your equipment runs, the lower limit to latency is the propagation of the the signal itself. In a vacuum, that’s a millisecond per 186 miles. Through copper or fiber, it just gets longer. Add-in a collection of routers and switchers and it gets a lot, lot longer. Think about being right next to your service provider with nothing but a short link in-between. How can you do that? Think Telx.

Telx is a colocation and interconnection company. They specialize in putting customers and service providers in close proximity. It starts with having colocation centers in 9 states with 15 sites. These are strategically located in key locations near media hubs, cable landings, fiber paths and exchanges. There are 4 locations in the New York Metro Area, two in Chicago, two in Dallas, three in California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Clara, and others in Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix and Charlotte.

Telx prides itself on having a network-neutral environment that supports over 750 telecommunications carriers, ISPs, content, cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. They already have over 28,000 direct connections. What this does is put your business in close proximity to the services you seek. Latency is certainly minimized by all being in the same facility or at least on the same backbone network, but cost is also minimized. With so many services just a patch cord away, you can get excellent prices on bandwidth and other IT services.

If your needs are critical and your demands high, you may well benefit from getting colo rack space in a Telx facility. They are all set up to support your rack, cabinet or cage with highly reliable power and cooling. Most facilities can provide you with 120v 2089v, 480v AC and -48v DC power.

In addition to space, power, HVAC and security, Telx has technicians available to support installations, turn up and provisioning of network equipment and circuits, right down to server reboots. They also have something called a “Virtual Xchange” that offers circuit multiplexing and demultiplexing, protocol conversions, law conversions and other grooming solutions. Their carrier hotel Meet Me Room encompasses the entire colocation center, with a passive and secure area called a Meet Me Area for customer interconnections via cross connects.

Network services are available that go way beyond mere bandwidth connections. There is video exchange, Internet exchange, managed security services and cloud computing as network enabled services.

Are your network and computing needs critical enough that minimizing latency offers a significant performance advantage, or are you just looking at colocation services as an opportunity to get better deals on bandwidth and minimize support operations at your own facility? If so, you could benefit by getting competitive quotes for server colocation services.