Google has announced Dedicated Interconnect. The solution will allow the company’s biggest customers to connect directly to Google Cloud. The move brings Google in line with AWS, Azure, SoftLayer, OVH and other large players in the cloud market. The only surprise here is that it has taken so long for Google to get its act together,
According to John Veizades, Product Manager, Dedicated Interconnect: “Easy to manage, high bandwidth, private, network connectivity is essential for large enterprises. That’s why today we’re announcing Dedicated Interconnect, a new way to connect to Google Cloud and access the world’s largest cloud network.”
What is Google offering?
The service will be available in 10Gb/s increments with customers able to buy up to 8 separate circuits. The table provided in the press release implies that the circuits can be bonded together to 4x10Gb/s = 40Gb/s. However, Google needs to clarify that as it could equally be that the customer just gets 4 separate circuits. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it could use them for load balancing.
Google is also offering customers a choice of uptime. They can buy into 99.9% or 99.99%. What isn’t clear is what compensation they will get if Google fails to achieve these times.
The service has been priced at $4.658 per hour or $3,400 per month per line. There are seventeen locations listed on the Dedicated Interconnect locations page.
Of more importance is that Google has decided to work with Equinix to deliver this solution. Equinix has carved out an impressive business with all the major datacentre operators by being the interconnect provider of choice. By going to Equinix, Google is joining the likes of Microsoft, IBM, AWS, Rackspace and Oracle. What makes this very interesting is that as customers move to a multi-cloud environment, Equinix is becoming a lynchpin in their communications.
What does this mean
Increased use of cloud services, especially hybrid cloud, requires ever larger amounts of data to move across wires. Doing this over the public Internet is not just limiting but plays havoc with applications that are sensitive to latency. The fact that it has taken Google this long to realise this is more than a surprise. However, in fixing it and choosing Equinix it has selected the one company with the most experience in delivering this.
It will be interesting to see how many customers take up this offer and, importantly, how many will also look to just extend their other interconnect services from Equinix to include Google.
