Telx and Appcore Promise to Deliver Cloud Business Solutions to Network Service Providers & Enterprises within 30 days
Introduction:
Darryl Brown, formerly of Telx and now with Appcore, was a speaker at the recent Cloud Connect 2012 conference in Santa Clara, CA. His talk delineated the many challenges end users face when connecting their private WAN to a network which will deliver Private Cloud services. He also indicated that many network operators/telcos would like to offer Cloud services to leverage their WANs, but they currently do not have the software tools to do so. Mr. Brown provided all the information for this article.
According to Mr. Brown, “The data center is like a mall in many ways in that enterprises, carriers, service providers and hosters all benefit from having a broad spectrum of customers in the facilitates. This creates an environment where business relationships can be formed. Telx focuses heavily on marketing to its community members and providing portal tools for them to publish their services and search for others.”
Telx Backgrounder:
Telx is a privately held company headquarteredin New York City with five facilities in the New York Metro Area, two facilities in Chicago, two facilities in Dallas, three facilities in California (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and two in Santa Clara) as well as facilities in Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, and Charlotte. Their highly secure, reliable enterprise-class facilities are located in very strategic data markets in the U.S. Therefore, customers can choose from premier data centers with the fewest network hops between end to end connections.
Founded in 2000, Telx built the largest carrier-neutral, physical layer interconnection facility at 60 Hudson Street, NY. In 2004, Telx acquired 56 Marietta Street, the premier carrier hotel building in Atlanta, GA. In December 2006, Digital Realty Trust, owner and manager of technology-related real estate, and Telx entered into an agreement whereby Telx now owns and manages interconnection facilities in 10 Digital Realty Trust buildings in the United States. With this momentum, Telx acquired NYC Connect’s interconnection facilities at 111 Eighth Avenue, NYC in March of 2007. Since 2007, Telx has expanded into four additional facilities (Santa Clara, Dallas, and two in New Jersey) and expanded its footprint within its existing facilities to meet the growing demand for its services. Telx now operates a national portfolio of 17 strategically located interconnection and co-location facilities.
How do customer’s use Telx’s interconnection facilities today? Many carriers, network service providers and hosting companies use Telx as the hub for interconnecting between different provider networks. Many of them also collocate their equipment (switches, routers, servers, firewallsm internet gateways etc) in Telx facilities. Telx leverages a range of technologies for interconnecting customers to each other in the facilities (and the metwros they reside) from traditional physical cross connects to optical services and Carrier Ethernet.
Telx also provides enterprise customers with services, these customers typically place their gateway equipment such as routers and firewalls in telx cloud connection centers to bridge between networks and centralize internet access typiucally reducing local loop/local access costs associated with backhaul to office locations – essentially creating a WAN HUB. They also tend to leverage telx facilities to operate their own data centers by moving data intensive and mission critical services to the facilities which not only improves on operational availability, backhaul costs and performance but also security as Telx data centers provides physical security in the form of biometrics as well as guards, locking cages and cabinets.Telx also provides enterprise customers with services, these customers typically place their gateway equipment such as routers and firewalls in telx cloud connection centers to bridge between networks and centralize internet access typiucally reducing local loop/local access costs associated with backhaul to office locations – essentially creating a WAN HUB. They also tend to leverage telx facilities to operate their own data centers by moving data intensive and mission critical services to the facilities which not only improves on operational availability, backhaul costs and performance but also security as Telx data centers provides physical security in the form of biometrics as well as guards, locking cages and cabinets.
Appcore Backgrounder:
Appcore delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technology to telcos, data centers, fiber rings, and enterprises to enable Public (service provider) and Private (enterprise) Cloud environments. Their flagship product, Appcore Onsite™, is a certified, integrated stack of hardware and software systems designed to be data center roll in ready, accelerating the deployment of Cloud environments.
Telx Partnership with Appcore:
This partnership permits Telx to offer a packaged hardware and software solution which enables network providers to sell private cloud services. Appcore enables Telx customers to accelerate time to market for their cloud solutions by delivering an integrated end-end cloud business to service providers, msps and Telcos. The system includes everything needed to start their own cloud business or augment their current hosting services.
“The partnership between Appcore and Telx is an important strategic alliance for enterprise and service providers wanting to deliver the benefits of private cloud to their customers. Telx is a world-class data center operator ideal for the Appcore Onsite Private Cloud solution. Through this alliance, we are able to bring a customer’s branded, private, dedicated cloud service online in 30 days or less with gold global support, enabling them to reap the rewards of cloud computing without the headaches of building it themselves,” said Brian Donaghy, Appcore CEO.
“Telx is proud to add Appcore as a strategic partner to our rapidly expanding Cloud Xchange community of value-added cloud service providers. With Appcore’s Onsite Private Cloud solution, customers can accelerate turnkey cloud deployments, achieve rapid time to value and leverage our purpose-built community that delivers the on-demand services, highly available networking and security solutions they require,” said Eric Shepcaro, CEO of Telx. “Our C3 Cloud Connection Centers offer the proximity, low latency and flexibility required to optimize Appcore’s innovative mix of private hosted cloud services, securely and cost-effectively.”
For details please see:
http://www.telx.com/Press-Releases/telx-and-appcore-team-up-for-private-hosted-cloud-services.html
Analysis: By partnering with Appcore, Telx can now address the needs of customers who are looking to deploy Infrastructure as a service offerings themselves but do not know where to start. Appcore provides not just hardware and software but the complete business solution complete with packaging, processes, training, branding and education to help Telx customers get their ‘cloud product offerings’ up and running in 30 days – generating revenue in 45. Appcore also has a continually growing applciations store that enables customers to pull-down application images, price them and publish them within their own branded cloud offering running on their Appcore Onsite cloud machines.
Appcore provides installation, remote management, break-fix and support 24×7 for Telx customers leveraging the Appcore® OnSite product backed by SLAs. Telx provides the space, connectivity, power and associated SLAs around availability, connectivity and provision to back theTelx offerings.
How Network Service Providers can Quickly offer Cloud Services to their Business Customers:
An example of a Telx customer who can benefit from the Telx-Appcore combined cloud solution is a Network Services Provider (NSP) that focuses on small to medium enterprises (SMBs) and wishes to add cloud services to its portfolio of services. Appcore would deploy Appcore Onsite into the chosen Telx facilities. That system would be connected to the Internet and the NSPs backbone. Appcore would then brand, integrate and train the customer subject matter experts on the system, educate their sales teams and help them price their offerings as well as create supporting collateral for their website etc..
“Typically this complete process takes 45 days or less end-end (before the customer launches their new product) from the point of signing a purchase order,” said Darryl Brown.
How Enterprise Customers Can Benefit from the Appcore Cloud Offering:
Appcore’s cloud software is not just used by Service providers it is also used by enterprise customers who want to leverage cloud technologies to automate their own internal business process, develop cloud applications or just improve efficiencies. Any enterprise customer currently operating their own servers, or renting dedicated hosted servers connected to private networks could migrate to a cloud platform.
This may provide the following benefits to Cloud customers:
-Centralize services in 2 or 3 Telx data centers
-Reduce backhaul costs (move network bridges and gateways ‘to the cloud’)
-Reduce IT overhead through automation inherent in cloud technologies
-Improve performance (reduce latency), leverage QoS by directly placing the cloud platform in the WAN and tagging traffic
-Optimize physical resource consumption (an appcore cloud machine can operate at 70% utilization and maintain high availability, typical servers rarely operate at more than 8-20% efficiency and most people need 2 or 3 servers (per application to maintain redundancy).
-Leverage a single platform to run multiple servers/services
-Reduce costs by migrating from traditional hosting services to dedicated hosted private clouds
Reducing Complexity and Reducing Time to get Private Cloud Services Up and Running:
Telx is working hard to educate the enterprise IT environments on the benefits of purchasing an integrated dedicated hosted Private Cloud solution over traditional hosting or using their own data center servers. What many people do not understand is that a cloud environment (such as the one provided by Appcore) includes firewalls, routers, servers, storage and all the software that an IT department would typically need. That’s a lot of hardware, software and real estate!
However, it is very complicated to find the optimal configuration and resources capable of building a complete solution and integrating all those components then testing them for resillience. Typically it takes around 9 months to build a stable cloud environment from current opensourcetechnologies, it takes additional time to create the product offerings and complete business solution. Telx and Appcore have packaged together a complete solution that can deliver cloud business solutions to Enterprise customers and Network Service Providers in 30 days or less!
According to Joe Weinman, Senior Vice President, Cloud Services and Strategy at Telx, “Telx is at the center of a significant ecosystem of network providers, cloud providers, enterprises, and their customers, offering a premier footprint for growing new revenues while optimizing performance and user experience.”
References:
Cloud Connect 2012: WAN issues still unresolved, but Telcos get serious about Cloud!
Does Anyone Really Care about lack of Cloud Computing Standards? Who’s doing what?
Telx Partners with Appcore to Provide Hosted Cloud Services
Disclaimer:
The author has no business relationship with either Telx or Appcore. All the information in the article was provided by Darryl Brown-formerly with Telx, but now with Appcore.