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.

OC-48 Pricing Reductions Make 2.5 Gbps Affordable

OC-48 bandwidth is a staple among regional Internet service providers and larger corporations. It forms the core or many fiber optic network backbones implemented as SONET rings over hundreds or even thousands of miles. Even with more availability than ever before, many businesses shy away from even considering this high bandwidth service in fear of the budget-busting sticker shock that they reasonably expect. It’s time to reconsider that decision.

OC-48 is one of the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standard service levels. These bandwidth levels pick up where T-carrier copper services leave off. DS3 or T3 lines provide 45 Mbps of transport. The equivalent OC or Optical Carrier level is OC-1 at 52 Mbps. OC-1 isn’t readily available as an actual line service. In practice the lowest level SONET fiber optic service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. The next practical step up is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. In some areas you can get OC-24 at 1.25 Gbps, but a more popular level is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. Beyond that is OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

What makes OC-48 so popular? Many incumbent and competitive carriers constructed their fiber optic networks around OC-48, although some of the largest have moved on to OC-192 and OC-768. OC-48 is widely used for tributaries from OC-192 backbone nodes. Some newer fiber networks are built upon IP cores, completely bypassing legacy SONET technology. Many more are running MPLS or Ethernet over SONET.

One reason for this is that the SONET core is already in place, including all the routing and switching equipment. Another is that SONET is a proven technology that is widely supported and designed for carrier-class services. For instance, most SONET rings are dual rings that offer protection from fiber cuts and equipment failures. In the event of an outage, switching from one ring to another is accomplished in less than 50 mSec.

Once a technology that carriers kept for themselves, OC-48 pricing has dropped so much over the years that it is now a popular connection for many businesses. This includes large hospital and medical center networks, video producers, content delivery networks, broadband Internet service providers, computer aided design firms, businesses with substantial e-commerce activities, popular websites, and heavy users of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is something of a two-edged sword. The advantages include fast scaling of services up and down as your needs change, high reliability, and the ability to empty local data centers to avoid ongoing capital and operating expenses. What might get lost in the initial zeal to outsource to the cloud is how you connect with your new virtual data center located hundreds or thousands of miles away. All of a sudden, WAN connections that were perfectly adequate when most of the IT servers were still on the corporate campus are now sluggish and unresponsive.

If you want to maintain or regain that snappy performance that comes with high speed low latency dedicated private line connections, you’ll need to upgrade your connections between your headquarters and your cloud services providers. OC-48 fiber optic bandwidth may be just the ticket. At two and a half times Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, you’ll have the capacity you need to avoid network congestion. With a protected service and SLA (service level agreement), you’ll have the reliable service you need for critical business operations. Finally, with recent price reductions from competitive service providers, you can now afford a level of service that previously seemed out of reach.

Have the requirements of your business increased because of business automation, new technologies such as video transport, or a move to the cloud? This is a good time to get a new set of lease prices for both Carrier Ethernet and SONET fiber optic services. High bandwidth circuits, such as OC-48, are now more affordable than ever before.

SONET Rings To Support Ethernet

The hot bandwidth service these days is Carrier Ethernet. Everybody wants it once they see the cost advantage over the WAN connection they have now. The big question is can they get it?

In most cases, the answer is yes for a couple of reasons. First, new competitive carriers are rapidly building out their fiber optic core networks based on IP from the start. These networks are tailor made for Carrier Ethernet services. It’s relatively easy to get a point to point Ethernet connection between two distant business locations and use it to link their respective LANs. The result is one larger bridged LAN that enables all employees to be on essentially the same corporate network.

The other reason that Ethernet WAN services are so readily available is that established SONET fiber optic networks are being pressed into service to deliver Ethernet to the customer. This is known as Ethernet over SONET or EoS. The core of the network is still SONET, but operations at that level are invisible to you. As far as you are concerned, your connection is Ethernet all the way.

There’s no reason that SONET can’t transport Ethernet, ATM or other protocols. It was designed as a transport technology and has been adapted over the years to carry whatever traffic required hauling. The origins of SONET, like T-Carrier, are with the telephone industry. The name is an acronym for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Note the term synchronous. That tells you SONET is set up to be a highly synchronized network. The designed is based on multiplexing thousands of small channels called DS0s that each hold one telephone call. These DS0 building blocks can be combined to create T1 and T3 lines or SONET services such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48.

The beauty of synchronization for circuit switched architectures based on time division multiplexing is that everything is orchestrated so tightly and you can easily multiplex and demultiplex channels and higher level services. The device that does this is called an ADM or Add/Drop Multiplexer. An ADM can drop off a T1 line, DS3, OC3 or other service at your door from a much higher speed fiber line that carries traffic for many customers.

How does Ethernet squeeze into those tiny telephone channels? It takes some doing, considering that each DS0 carries exactly 64 Kbps. That’s about the speed of an old dial-up modem. What the industry has done is replace the telephone oriented channels with large concatenated frames and various mapping techniques to more efficiently carry Ethernet packets. SONET networks can now readily carry Ethernet services from standard 10 Mbps Ethernet to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE).

A feature of most SONET networks that makes them highly reliable is their twin ring design. Two separate fiber strands are used simultaneously. Each carries the same traffic, but in opposite directions. If a fault occurs in the working ring, the network switches over to the protection ring within 50 mSec. This self-healing property works best when the two rings are widely separated so that a single backhoe cut or equipment fault doesn’t take out both rings at once.

Ethernet over SONET and native IP networks are making Carrier Ethernet services of all speeds readily available for businesses looking to upgrade their bandwidth connections at reasonable costs. How much are we talking? Find out with an instant online Ethernet Fiber quote for 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps service levels. Higher bandwidths and SONET services quotes need some manual effort but will be sent to you promptly.

Combine T1 Lines For Higher Speed

T1 lines have been popular with small and medium businesses for decades. They are highly reliable, private, dedicated bandwidth, and easy to come by. With fierce competition bringing down prices in recent years, what’s not to like? If only you could get T1 lines to run faster....

There’s a way to do that and still keep all the advantages of T1 line technology. The technique is called bonding. It’s an industry standard method of combining the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines so that they behave as a single much larger connection.

You can’t really hot-rod a single T1 line. The system was designed to be synchronized so that the line can be segmented into 24 separate telephone lines or multiplexed into higher bandwidth services. A T1 line runs at 1.5 Mbps and that’s that. What bonding does is let you bring in another T1 line and hook the two together for 3 Mbps.

Why upgrade in the first place? Bandwidth demands are increasing. You know that every few years you need to upgrade the processing power and RAM in your PCs to keep running efficiently with upgraded browsers and other applications. Expect the same to be true of your WAN connections. Whether it’s file transfers from point to point between business locations, Internet access or a connection to cloud services, you’ll need higher bandwidth to stay competitive.

T1 lines can be combined in larger groups to give you even more bandwidth. Bonding 3 T1s provides 4.5 Mbps, 4 T1 lines offer 6 Mbps, 5 bonded lines equal 7.5 Mbps, 6 T1s provide 9 Mbps, 7 T1 lines offer 10.5 Mbps and 8 bonded T1 lines get you to 12 Mbps. Eight line bonding is about as high as most carriers go. The cost of bonded T1 is equal to the price of a single T1 times the number of lines used. When you get past 8 T1s it is generally cheaper to move up to DS3 or even fiber optic connections.

How do you connect all these T1 lines coming into your facility? Your service provider will take care of that. They supply a managed router with multiple WAN Interface Cards (WIC) that handled the interface to each T1 line. The router then does the bonding in tandem with carrier equipment on the other end and delivers a single bandwidth port (RJ45) running at the higher bonded speed.

This is important. For bonding to work, you need to get all of your T1 lines from a single provider. If you try to mix and match vendors, they have no way of coordinating line operation and you just wind up with Individual T1 lines. You can do load balancing with your own routers or buy a bandwidth aggregation appliance to combine unrelated lines, but this is not true bonded T1.

Does any other service compete directly with bonded T1? Yes, Ethernet over Copper does something very similar. It bonds multiple twisted copper pair (up to 8 pair) to deliver a single bandwidth service from 2 Mbps to over 100 Mbps. The trick in delivering the higher bandwidths is a more sophisticated modulation scheme that is distance sensitive. The nearer you are to the central office, the higher the speed available. If available, you can probably get higher bandwidths and better prices than bonded T1 services. However, availability is generally limited to metropolitan areas at this time.

What are the best bandwidth services available to support your applications? Get instant online pricing for bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper to compare prices and availability at your business locations.

MPLS Network Services

Wide area networks are almost a utility service for businesses today. You can’t get much done without broadband connectivity and the ability to securely transfer information between business locations. Do you really want to go back to FAX messages and overnight mail to conduct business? On the other hand, can you afford to do everything you need to do electronically? You can with the right WAN connections.

The idea behind MPLS networks is the ability to send anything, anywhere, anytime without in any way affecting the voice, video or data involved. Many networks can’t do this very well. Take the Internet, for example. It definitely lets you connect to anybody, anywhere on Earth. How robust that connection is and how transparent it is to the packets that traverse it is another matter.

The whole reason for using TCP/IP to transmit data is to ensure that what you send gets delivered intact at the other end. It won’t necessarily happen on the first attempt. If is doesn’t work, TCP gives it another try. Eventually, everything you need to recreate a file on the far end that exactly matches the one that was sent arrives and can be re-assembled in order.

Time sensitive transmissions, such as interactive voice and video, may not fare so well. Just about any little upset causes them to glitch noticeably. Video may pixelate. Audio starts to distort and break up. As delays in transmission time mount, it may be hard to maintain an interactive conversation. You just don’t know when the other person will start speaking.

Little wonder that companies tend to stick with legacy technologies, like analog voice, that they know work, or create their own proprietary and very pricy internal networks. At least when you build it yourself, you have some control of the results.

The high cost and labor intensive nature of private networks combined with the flakiness of the public Internet is what makes MPLS networks shine. An MPLS network is a carefully engineered and managed wide area network for hire. MPLS networks have a regional, national or international footprint. You connect each of your locations to the network through an access connection, which may be anything from a T1 line or ISDN PRI, to a DS3, SONET/SDH, or an Ethernet over copper or fiber service.

MPLS networks are often referred to as “cloud” networks. You connect to and from the cloud, but don’t have to worry about managing the internals of the network. What’s happening inside the MPLS cloud is that special tags are added to your packets as they enter the network and removed when they leave. While on the network, those tags are used to route your packets from source to destination. The actual content of your packets is not disturbed in the process.

The MPLS network itself has to be transparent to all the traffic flowing through it. That means having adequate bandwidth available to support all users. MPLS supports all types of traffic, including IP data transfers, VoIP telephony, ISDN PRI telephony, video conferencing, video streaming and so on. You can specify the quality of service characteristic for each of your packets and the network will ensure that you have the bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss characteristics to support that quality. The MP in MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol, and that’s exactly what it is.

MPLS networks have largely replaced Frame Relay networks, a lower speed & less sophisticated approach to the same service. They are also replacing proprietary corporate networks constructed from multiple point to point line services. When it comes to connections that span the country and even reach out to international destinations, MPLS networks offer significant cost savings while maintaing high quality of service.

Do MPLS Networks make sense for your operation? Find out by checking the cost and availability of MPLS Network Services. Then compare price, effort and quality with what you are doing now to make the best decision.