Edge data centers enable enterprises to achieve digital efficiency

The dynamism and spontaneity of the current economic environment has spurred digital adoption among organizations. Enterprises are striving for better infrastructure management that will deliver flexibility, IT operations efficiency and ability to maximise reach.

Enterprises are building their digital roadmap with a hybrid multi-cloud model comprising of – private cloud, multiple public clouds, and third party colocation. Regardless of the architecture—there are two crucial considerations for a hybrid setup. One is a highly reliable data center, offering 99.999% uptime under 24×7 supervision of experts; and second is secure, high-speed, low latency network connectivity. In the outsourcing proposition, the network component is extremely critical as it ‘glues’ together the various aspects of enterprises’ IT architecture.

The emergence of Hyperconnected Edge data centers with multiple Cloud Service Providers and Cloud Exchange, along with large congregation of Telcos, ISPs and multiple Internet Exchanges, is crucial for enterprises’ digital transformation. The fundamental purpose of an ‘Edge Data Center’ is to provide connectivity-rich, vendor neutral and open Interconnection Ecosystem, not only connecting businesses to cloud providers but also to their remote workforce, customers, partners, and ecosystems like financial institutes and stock exchanges, among others.

GPX – Carrier Neutral DC and an Interconnection Leader
GPX India is a Tier-IV Edge Data Center Campus offering colocation services and an interconnection ecosystem with multiple network partners, Edge PoPs of over 8 major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and India’s first ‘Open Cloud Exchange’.

It has been recognised as one of the Top 10 Hyperconnected Enterprise Networking Hubs by Telegeography. Other global data center operators named in this list include Equinix, Coresite, TELEHOUSE and SUNeVision.

Enterprises can leverage a highly Interconnected Edge DC

• The presence of AWS Direct Connect, Google Dedicated Interconnect and Oracle FastConnect within the GPX data center, enables dedicated private connectivity to cloud over a LAN fibre cable, bypassing the public Internet.
• GPX hosts 12 Carriers and 170+ ISPs, thus providing a rich interconnection ecosystem which helps implement a robust and scalable hybrid network with a wide choice of Telecom providers. These carriers also provide access to the eyeballs for all major Content Distribution Network (CDNs), and most of the largest Global Content providers (OTTs) present in GPX campus.
• GPX is the only data center campus in India with presence of five Internet Exchanges: AMS-IX, Bharat IX, DE-CIX, Extreme IX and NIXI . Interconnect solutions offered by IXes enable low latency, cost effective connectivity between businesses and their remote workforce, partners and customers. Enterprises can save on the bandwidth cost, more so in the current situation when the LAN traffic has been replaced by internet traffic.
• Financial companies, like e-commerce, payment gateways, banking institutions including stock exchanges, can set up their edge node inside the data center and connect to Internet Exchanges. An IX allows connectivity to multiple ISPs and carriers in a most reliable environment, with improved latency and low cost. This helps financial companies to pass on the speed, cost and reliability advantages to their end users/ customers.

GPX: India’s first DC to launch an ‘Open Cloud Exchange’
A Cloud Exchange enables enterprises to connect to multiple cloud providers via a single port. GPX Open Cloud Exchange service enables direct, private, and secure connection to multiple CSPs hosted inside the same GPX Mumbai data center campus where the cloud exchange is hosted. Through a cloud exchange, GPX has come up with an easy way for enterprises to off-load their IT workloads to multiple CSPs in a LAN setup, with high flexibility with scalable interconnection capacity from 50 Mbps to 1G/ 10G.

Enterprises not colocated at GPX can take a leased line or MPLS link to the GPX data center and connect to the cloud exchange on a single port and leverage the flexibility to connect to multiple CSPs for a multi-cloud strategy. Enterprises can also save on the download charges of CSP as the charges are much lower in case of a dedicated connection to a CSP through a cloud exchange, as compared to connecting over internet.

Edge Data Centers with a dense Interconnection Ecosystem will emerge as a vital building block of enterprise’s digital roadmap and business strategy. CT Bureau