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Why Successful Businesses Choose a Carrier Dense Data CenterA RACK59 eBook

Today’s successful businesses are not only data-driven organizations, they create digital ecosystems that make data highly accessible, reliable and secure. These businesses prioritize the fulfillment of bandwidth needs fueled by complex applications, big data, IoT, digital media and the connected use of cloud computing. Consequently, many have turned to carrier-dense data centers.

Colocation data centers must operate at the intersection between third-party specialty service providers and ISPs (carriers). More than just a place for data storage, they must to

facilitate the need for cloud, disaster recovery, and other services. To serve the data-driven business they must deliver the cost effectiveness, throughput, redundancy, security, and choice that successful businesses need for stability and growth.

This is the fulcrum point upon which the carrier-dense data center operates, which is what attracts the most successful businesses across industries, sectors and size. But what is a carrier-dense data center?

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What is a Carrier Dense Data Center?

A carrier-dense data center is built upon the foundation of carrier neutrality. That ownership independence enables them to attract many Tier-1 network providers (the largest ISPs/carriers with the biggest networks). By having the physical points of presence (PoP) and routers of these carriers installed in the data center, businesses can have a direct connection to their choice of carrier based on their needs.

To enable simple and smooth connections to the carrier (or multiple carriers for redundancy) of choice, these data centers set up a physical space known as a meet-me room (MMR). Not only do businesses use the MMR to interconnect or cross connect to one or more carriers, the carriers also can connect to each other to avoid local loop charges.

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Data Speed and CapacityCarrier-dense data centers enable businesses to better control costs and reliability with bandwidth flexibility within the same data center as well as low latency. Data transfer speed and data capacity are crucial concerns for data driven businesses, which can be explained as:

Bandwidth is essentially about how much data can be transferred in a second

Latency is the amount of time it takes data to travel from the source to its destination.

Successful digital businesses need the right bandwidth (data transfer capacity per second) as well as low latency (fast, uninterrupted data transfers per second.

Greater Geographical Reach

for Data TransfersThese data centers foster competition among carriers, which enables businesses to shop between different network providers to find the lowest price for the best cross connection. As every carrier has a different route, using multiple carriers to travel different fiber or copper routes delivers dependable services to different geographic locations, which extends the reach of the data center’s clients.

How Carrier-Dense Data Centers Drive Successful Businesses

Choosing a carrier-dense data center is foundational for today’s businesses focused on growth, flexibility, reliability, speed and security. They enable businesses to build out infrastructure that is foundational to efficient end-user interaction and productivity while providing the business with scalability for growth.

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A carrier-neutral facility that is also carrier dense has the superior infrastructure and staff to foster the support to meet the changing needs of the business. These facilities can deliver much greater reliability and flexibility to businesses that are in a strategic growth mode.

Flexibility and Support

One way that these businesses take advantage of the carrier density of the data center is to engage two or more carriers to connect to their vital systems. This redundancy ensures that if an outage occurs with one carrier’s network, the second carrier can be the failover so that there is no downtime.

Redundancy for Greater Reliability

The most successful businesses understand that moving data quickly and reliably is vital to the organization whether it’s from one office or enterprise to another, or to large numbers of end users. This can be across the state, a region, the country or even the globe.

Since businesses must pay carrier fees to move this data across different carriers it can be costly. This is where peering and exchanges provide the data center and the business with a solution that increase the benefits for everyone.

Peering Networks and Exchanges

Businesses have an additional benefit at their disposal when choosing a carrier-dense data center via what is called peering networks. This is where carriers within carrier dense data centers share the load and exchange traffic. When peering happens within a data center, it is done via the carriers sharing a direct network rather than routing traffic through the public Internet.

This ensures that heavy data traffic does not slow down since it takes a direct route rather than the indirect route via the public Internet. These slowdowns can cause latency problems for business clients as well as public sector and

educational institutions. For example, application access for remote offices, video streaming, and unified communications could all become uneven, slow and low quality. Carrier-dense data centers set up what is called an internet exchange point (IXP). Businesses that have high data traffic needs can join this centralized exchange so that they can pay one set fee for data across the private or public peer network. This not only saves a considerable amount of money in carrier costs across two or more carriers, it improves data transfer speeds, reduces latency and provides bandwidth flexibility.

Peering networks can be private (two carriers within a data center), or they can be public (an exchange between multiple peers on a shared network, not necessarily in the same colocation center).

A Peering Exchange is all about redundancy and routing capability. Peering can route traffic in a more direct pattern, which vastly improves the traffic-time-to-destination ratio. This is only one of the many ways that carrier-dense data centers serve the needs of the successful digital business.

When seeking to understand the basics of peering networks and exchanges, the most important aspects to understand are:

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Higher performance

Low-cost data transfers

Lower latency

Carrier-Dense Data Centers: Serving the Needs of the Digital Business

Businesses that access the exchange via their carrier-dense data center get:

In addition, they get greater security for their data since they can combine solutions across data centers and metro areas for both production and disaster recovery requirements. IXPs give businesses a great deal of flexibility as well since they can enable a business to change its bandwidth plan to accommodate traffic needs as it grows or its needs grow. These needs could include:

Today’s successful digital businesses are built for change to adapt to data needs and the rapidly evolving technology that supports it. The most successful businesses have already made great strides in transforming their complex data ecosystems. They have worked to remove organizational silos, enabled on-demand access, and implemented strategies that maximize the value that can be derived from that data in real time.

The carrier-dense data center lies at the heart of this change and the success of these businesses. They make this possible by facilitating the easy, secure, reliable, and flexible flow of data internally and externally to the organizations ecosystem of partners, end users and clients. Consequently, the digital business is poised for adaptability in the pursuit of greater growth and success.

• Teleconferencing• Videoconferencing• VoIP & Unified Communications services• Gaming• Video on Demand

• Software Distribution• Ecommerce• Peer-to-Peer File Sharing• Complex Application Access, and more

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