New York City Internet Infrastructure

When it comes to high bandwidth network services, you would expect New York City to be among the most infrastructure rich places in the world. You’d be right. One key hub in this infrastructure is the network colocation center at 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. This is where Telx operates their flagship carrier hotel and network interconnection facility.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Ben Mendelsohn discusses his short documentary, Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, which includes a tour of the Telx facility at 60 Hudson. You can watch it right here and get a fascinating view into the inner workings of network interconnections, like those at the heart of the Internet.



The Telx data center at 60 Hudson is their flagship colocation and interconnection facility. Within the walls of the old Western Union Building, Telx offers low-latency access to more than 400 carriers, financial exchanges, application providers, media and content providers, SaaS providers and other enterprises through a single connection. This is why companies that need high bandwidth, low latency connections choose to colocate at 60 Hudson or in another Telx facility. It’s hard to get much closer to your service provider than to be situated in the same building.

Cross connections are at the heart of the Telx colocation centers. This is nothing more than simple wired or fiber connections from a customer’s equipment rack, cabinet or cage to a passive interconnection panel in the interconnection space. The cross connect allows you to connect to any of the other services in the facility. If you change your mind or want connection to additional providers, it’s a simple matter of patching from your panel to theirs.

In addition to the passive cross connects, Telx also offers dynamic interconnections. They are a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange through a E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. What this service does is allow Ethernet service providers to connect to each other through a standardized interface so that each provider extends the reach of their network. This is especially valuable for IP core networks which would otherwise have to first convert another protocol like SONET/SDH to achieve commonality with other networks.

In addition to 60 Hudson Street in New York City, Telx has another facility at 111 Eighth Avenue in NYC, two locations in New Jersey, two facilities in Chicago, two more in Dallas, plus colocation and interconnection centers in San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, Charlotte, Los Angeles and Santa Clara. That’s 15 buildings spread out nationwide, with at least one close to your business location. They also have partnerships with Tata and Interxion for global locations.

If you have a need for high speed Internet access, cloud access, content delivery, low latency connections or other private line or network services, it is well worth your while to look into services and pricing for colocation and interconnection services from Telx and other premier service providers.

Hosted Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is getting a lot of interest today for good reason. As stagnated economic conditions become the new normal, the attractiveness of pay as you go computing becomes more compelling. Combine that with near instant scalability and you have a computing environment that has a cost related to your level of business activity, with little or no need for planned investments. There are other advantages, too. These have to do with disaster recovery and business telephone infrastructure.

Let’s take disaster recovery. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and fires are real threats to company data centers. What happens if you get wiped out? You can rebuild, of course. But how long is that going to take and how do you do business in the meantime?

Cloud computing can come to the rescue. The infrastructure is already in place. All you need to do is sign up for service and upload your software and data files. You DO have backups stored remotely, right? Perhaps that’s another good argument for having at least some computing or storage in the cloud. A local disaster probably won’t affect a remote data center.

Company telephone systems are also local infrastructure intensive. They require investment, maintenance, repaid and eventual replacement. Once again, if a local disaster strikes your phones can be down for the long haul. A Hosted PBX system is the voice equivalent of cloud computing. You pay by the seat by the month for switching services and a rich feature set. The provider takes care of all equipment, sometimes including the actual phones in the monthly service fee.

Cloud services comprise a wide diversity in types of services available and in the mix of private vs public clouds. Yes, you can own and run your own cloud. If your company is large enough to justify the investment and expense and you want total control, it is certainly feasible to set up your data centers under a cloud model. What this involves is redundancy in hardware and extensive virtualization. You need enough resources on standby to ensure that you can accommodate failures plus any swing in workload demand. If you run out of resources, it’s not much of a cloud.

The other extreme is to outsource everything to a public cloud. You wind up with no servers or storage and only need to bring your applications software and a high bandwidth, low latency connection. The cloud provider ensures there is sufficient capacity in the system to serve all users. That includes being able to scale to meet increasing demand and bursting to handle short term peaks.

A full public cloud makes companies with large and critical needs a bit nervous. Murphy’s Law has been known to strike everywhere, including Amazon’s massive cloud structure. There’s also anxiety over security. Determined hackers seem to find their way into anything where there’s even the slightest opportunity. You can claim military grade encryption all you want, but it’s tough to prove that break-ins are impossible and will always be impossible.

For those reasons, large operations are leaning to the hybrid cloud model with some resources local and others off in the cloud. There are a couple of other approaches to keeping everything with your own walls. One is to have someone else build and operate a private cloud for you. That’s a cloud-modeled computing environment but dedicated to your exclusive use. The private cloud can be hosted in a secure colocation facility close to high bandwidth providers. You not only offload the cost of ownership and maintenance, but can probably save on bandwidth costs too.

The other hosted solution is to create your own cloud, but do within the colo center using rented equipment. In this case, you are still responsible for the design and resource allocation of the hosted cloud, but it’s all done on a pay by the month basis rather than capital investment.

Are you interested in giving cloud computing a role in your business strategy? If so, compare features and costs for cloud hosted voice and data services to meet your business needs.

Colocation and Connectivity in Miami

If you want to connect with South America, Central America, the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, you’ll do well to colocate and connect through Miami, Florida. Telx has all the facilities to help you do just that.

Telx has made a name for itself serving the needs of the financial services industry by providing ultra-low latency connections to the electronic trading floors. Their services range far and wide, literally. With 15 colocation facilities in the United States and global connectivity to more than 800 carriers, you are clearly well connected with Telx.

Let’s take a look at what Telx has to offer through their Miami facility. It’s all about the interconnections. You lease a secure cabinet or private cage to house your servers and other network equipment. Telx supplies the AC or DC power you need, plus the environmental control and physical security. If you want to connect with any other customers of their facilities, Telx technicians will perform a cross connect within 24 to 48 hours. You have choice of media that includes Ethernet copper, DS3 coax, and fiber optic cabling.

What about outside connectivity? You’ll find major carriers located right in the facility, including AT&T, Bell South, Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications, TW Telecom, Verizon Business, and XO Communications, to name a few. You also have access to international cable landings that include ARCOS, ARCOS II, Americas II, Columbus III, Emergia (Telefonica) GlobalNet Brasil Telecom, Maya-1, and Mid-Atlantic Crossing .

What’s more, Telx has a private optical ring to NAP of the Americas, also located in Miami. This ring support all Ethernet, TDM and SONET/SDH services. Through NAP of the Americas, you’ll be able to connect to dozens more of the world’s most important carriers.

Telx is located in downtown MIami in a seven story, 50,000 square foot building structurally designed to withstand natural disasters, including Category 5 hurricanes. It’s located outside the FEMA 100 year designated flood zone and the Miami-Date hurricane evacuation zone. This makes the Telx Miami colocation center a premier gateway for South American and Latin American international voice, video and data traffic.

More and more businesses are taking a closer look at cloud services and colocation because of the connectivity and cost savings available compared to running their own data center facilities. Telx can provide you with a secure location to install your equipment, connections to many carriers that can often be hard to reach from your location and enough competition among carriers to give you the best bandwidth prices you can get. They have a technical staff on duty 24/7/365, something that is becoming a luxury for many companies.

Is colocation right for you? The way to decide is to run the numbers compare your current costs of operation with what you’ll pay at a colocation center. Don’t forget to include special connectivity that you may not be able to get where you are, such as ultra low latency connections. Compare prices and services at data center colocation facilities, including Telx, with friendly expert consultation to help you sort through the myriad of options.



Note: Photo of downtown Miami buildings courtesty of Dtobias on Wikimedia Commons.

Low Latency Connections Bridge The Atlantic

Nothing says that we are part of a global marketplace like the terabytes of data that zip back and forth constantly through the world’s fiber optic trunk lines. Intercontinental cables have been in place for decades. But now there’s a new service gaining importance. It’s low latency networks.

What’s driving the demand for low latency right now is high speed financial trading. Increased use of automated trading programs has created a competition for getting trades placed first. First may mean milliseconds or even microseconds ahead of other traders. Certainly this is beyond the capability of the fastest human traders manually entering data. But it’s also so fast that path between traders and exchanges influences performance. The time delay in that path is called latency.

What’s needed for low latency connections is minimizing the distance between source and destination and minimizing the processing time of the electronics in the network. When microseconds make a difference, the speed of light comes into play. The fastest a signal can go is about 186 miles per millisecond. That’s the speed of light in a vacuum. In a physical wire or fiber optic strand, that speed is even less.

In the United States, low latency network services have taken two forms. One is a fiber optic cable running in as straight a line as possible between trading centers, say Chicago and New York. The amount of equipment on that line is minimized and engineered to pass signals as fast as possible.

Another approach is colocation. Companies move into a colocation facility, such as the ones offered by Telx, to be as close to the electronic trading floors as possible. It’s possible to save tens of milliseconds by just being physically next door.

Level 3 Communications has now established low latency connections that span the Atlantic from Europe to North America. They’ve also established direct connectivity with BATS Europe, a European Multilateral Trading Facility.

Financial services are a leading application driving the construction of low latency networks worldwide. There are other applications that are latency sensitive as well. It’s well known that VoIP telephony works best if latency is minimized. Long delays in voice packets cause “clipping” of conversations and may even result in dropped calls. Two-way video conferencing is also affected by high latencies. In fact, any interactive application requires some limitations on latency to function properly. As companies commit more of their business processes to cloud computing, latency issues that were once non-existant will become painfully apparent.

Has your company or organization developed a need for low latency communications linking locations in North or South America, Europe, Asia, Australia or Africa? Find out what services are available to meet your requirements for international high bandwidth low latency network connections. With multiple providers, prices are competitive.