Equinix Pitches Private Links to New AWS Data Center in Frankfurt

Piggybacking on the announcement of the new Amazon Web Services data center in the Frankfurt area Thursday, Equinix announced customers can connect to the new cloud availability region privately from 10 of its data centers in Germany.

Called AWS Direct Connect, the connectivity service bypasses the public Internet, which according to the companies improves performance and security in connecting a customer’s servers to Amazon’s cloud. The service is available in Equinix and other providers’ data centers around the world. Microsoft offers similar private links to its Azure cloud from colocation data centers.

Only one Equinix data center in Germany, FR5 in Frankfurt, is linked directly to Amazon’s facility, but other sites in Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf can link to FR5 via Equinix’s Metro Connect network. Customers in other Equinix locations in Germany and elsewhere have to go through third-party carriers to use the service, according to an Equinix blog post.

Amazon’s Frankfurt facility is its first in the country and second in Europe. Having a physical location within Germany is important for cloud service providers that want to do business with German customers, who are reportedly more sensitive to data sovereignty issues and who have to comply with stricter data location regulations than customers elsewhere.

It was also important for Amazon to open a second availability region in Europe, so customers could set up geographically separated redundant cloud infrastructure without storing data outside of the continent. The other European AWS data center is in Dublin, Ireland.

Availability of AWS Direct Connect in other data centers in Germany amplifies Amazon’s ability to serve the more security- and latency-sensitive enterprise customers in the country. This is the eighth metro globally where the cloud connectivity service is available to Equinix customers.

“Our goal at Equinix is to help our enterprise customers realize the full benefits of the cloud, without worrying about application latency or cost issues,” Eric Schwartz, Equinix EMEA president, said in a statement.