Equinix to light up CyrusOne Cincinnati data centre in 2016 (Image credit:Freeimages/Keith Syvinski
Equinix to light up CyrusOne Cincinnati data centre in 2016

CenturyLink has announced that it has lit up several more CyrusOne data centres in the US to its fibre network. This will improve the interconnected cloud offering that both customers of CyrusOne and CenturyLink are offering their customers, bypassing local loop and reducing latency between the sites.

Josh Snowhorn, Vice President and GM of Interconnection at CyrusOne (source linkedIN)
Josh Snowhorn, Vice President and GM of Interconnection at CyrusOne

This latest announcement sees the addition of five new connections bringing the total to 12 out of 29 US based CyrusOne data centres connected to CenturyLink. What is perhaps surprising is that CenturyLink has not connected Singapore or London yet, which might have helped those CyrusOne customers with international presence to have improved disaster recovery or replication sites in Europe and Asia.

Josh Snowhorn, vice president and general manager, interconnection, CyrusOne clearly feels that this enhances the offering that CyrusOne delivers to its customers in saying: “We’re proud and excited to welcome CenturyLink’s fiber infrastructure in a total of 12 out of the 29 CyrusOne data centers in the US.

“CenturyLink’s increased connectivity with our data center facilities means that CyrusOne’s enterprise customers have another top-tier network to choose as their primary or backup data transport solution.”

CyrusOne interconnections

These new connections are not yet live though and while customers may be chomping at the bit to take advantage of them they will have to wait until early 2016 before Cincinnati, Houston West III, San Antonio II and Sterling, Va go live.

For CenturyLink who recently announced the progress of their virtualisation plans, this seems a weak response to the Equinix announcements around their connection to IBM Softlayer, Rackspace and most recently Oracle adding significant weight to their cloud exchange program.

Eric Barrett, Senior Director, Network Product Management, CenturyLink (Source linkIn)
Eric Barrett, Senior Director, Network Product Management, CenturyLink

Eric Barrett, director, network product management, CenturyLink is bullish about the benefits that these interconnections will give them, commenting: “With a direct connection to CenturyLink’s network, a business becomes connected to nearly 300 data centers, including more than 60 facilities where CenturyLink provides IT services, and more than 40,000 multi-tenant unit office buildings.

“We’re pleased to welcome CyrusOne and its customers to CenturyLink’s growing ecosystem of interconnected data centers and the end-to-end suite of services we offer to help fulfill a customer’s workload requirements.”

At first glance this may seem trivial compared to the giants that Equinix has peered with, but it is a smart move by CenturyLink.  CyrusOne may only have 900 customers using their datacentres but it is the nature of those customers that may determine the success of this arrangement.

In yet to be connected CyrusOne’s London data centre it hosts a number of Cloud Service Providers (CPSs) including Telstra International, SunGard and Navisite. When their customer number are added together it is far more than those direct with CyrusOne. While London isn’t yet included in the connected sites there is no reason to doubt that CyrusOne does not have similar customers in the US.

The risk of these interconnections is that customers have greater freedom to move certain workloads between clouds, which may mean that prices may need to be kept more in sync than they have done in the past. For customers this is a good thing as it will allow a greater freedom of movement than has been possible before.

These connections also add to the CyrusOne Internet Exchange (IX), that provides metro-enabled interconnections. This provides customers with high-performance, low-cost data transfer and accessibility across several data centers in the CyrusOne portfolio.

Conclusion

This is a positive move by both CyrusOne and Centurylink, however it is disappointing that the international sites are not included in this latest wave. One also might have expected by now an announcement that the remaining data centres would be linked to cement the relationship between the two companies.

There is no doubt that this is a win for customers. It enables them to take advantage of the CenturyLink cloud platform and the services it can offer including big data analytics, business continuity, disaster recovery services, managed hosting and data systems management. CyrusOne is a more traditional hosting environment but aims at delivering solutions for CSP’s creating the Sky for the Cloud™ that may be attractive for companies looking to host additional elements within their datacentres.

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