Hurricane Sandy provided a reminder that businesses need to consider business continuity and disaster recovery as part of overall business and IT strategies. Increasingly demanding customer expectations and accelerating usage of cloud services and hybrid architectures require a variety of network strategies to connect users, enterprise data centers, colocation facilities, and the cloud.
These trends are behind recent interconnection moves by Telx, as the company continues to up its interconnection game. Telx has announced the combined availability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect for Telx clients across the United States.
This mean customers in Telx data centers can now leverage private interconnection to an expanded roster of AWS facilities, and this can be combined with network services from the hundreds of carriers and cloud providers interconnecting at Telx’s facilities.
"Extending Telx’s service offerings with AWS enables clients to design their applications to achieve faster end-user response times, greater security and availability, and better protection from potential regional failures,” said Joe Weinman, senior vice president of cloud services and strategy for Telx. “Today’s enterprises face an array of complex application and architectural requirements. Telx’s continued investments in state-of-the-art facilities and ever-increasing ability to provide a rich variety of interconnection solutions between facilities and to AWS continues to increase the value of the Telx ecosystem.”
This announcement means its clients can procure secure, private access to the AWS network to support requirements for mission-critical systems in the event of a disaster. Also, its clients with international end-users can leverage Telx’s gateway facilities, international network service providers, and Telx’s AWS Direct Connect and Datacenter Connect to enable localized access to their global user base. Basically, the company is taking several steps to make sure all sorts of connection options are available nation-wide to its customers.
This widening interconnection strategy is applicable in a variety of scenarios. The company provided a few in the release:
- Connectivity for direct storage - Private, high-throughput access to AWS facilitates periodic migration/replication of data to or from AWS into customer-managed storage solutions; this enables a wide spectrum of business continuity/disaster recovery policies and data retention strategies.
- Big Data - High-bandwidth connectivity provides customers with the ability to efficiently transfer large data volumes into and out of AWS, allowing for import/export of large-scale data sets for high performance "big data" computing applications.
- High-performance applications - High bandwidth combined with low-latency connectivity for improved I/O and API response times allows customers to use AWS as an extension of their data center LAN and integrate hybrid cloud strategies into a wide range of applications.
- Custom hybrid architectures - High-throughput access to AWS enables integration of custom hardware solutions into the AWS management system, with real-time streaming of data to and from AWS.
