All data centres are not the same - proximity matters

• 4000 data centres available globally, but finding the right ones is the problem
• Choosing the right provider located in the right place is a mammoth task
• TeleGeography says it has the right tool for the job

TeleGeography says it’s launched a ‘WAN Geography Benchmarking’ tool via which enterprises and digital service providers can identify the most connected data center facilities across the globe and choose the local and global hubs that are best for them - it will also provide a guide for industry players looking to understand the shape of the market and compare their own current or planned facilities against those of their competitors.

According to Tim Stronge, Vice President of Research at TeleGeography, “When it comes to selecting data centers and carriers to support a wide-area network, two major challenges are scale and competing priorities. Network designers and managers need to take a lot of factors into consideration such as office proximity, cost and connectivity. This can be a very timely and costly process without the right tools,” He claims the WAN Geography Benchmark simplifies and automates the process and makes mission-critical data and insights immediately available.

TeleGeography says it’s shared a sample dataset and evaluated data center connectivity and cost using 10 global cities based on their prevalence in real multinational enterprise networks. Cities included were: London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, Sydney, and Mexico City.

The biggest were Equinix FR5 in Frankfurt (which led the segment with 166 carrier networks available and 37 cloud access providers) ; Telehouse in London; CoreSite LA1 in Los Angeles MEGA 1 HK1, also in Hong Kong had the highest number of carriers attached to them. 

Unique characteristics

“Each data center facility has its own unique characteristics and offers different advantages. Network designers and managers have over 4,000 data centers and hundreds of carriers to consider when growing their international presence. The WAN Geography Benchmark delivers bespoke scoring for each facility based on an enterprise’s individual requirements. It removes the complexity from decision making and enables enterprises to develop business cases with reliable and trusted data,” said Greg Bryan, Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. “We give enterprises the tools to understand the opportunity in each facility and build the networks they need.”

According to Greg, talking to me in a separate conversation, the big are getting bigger because of the network effect (if everyone is already there, I need to be there too). 

“Equinix for instance, is 50 per cent larger than its nearest competitor and then they are orders of magnitude larger than the next.” 

But Greg has also noticed a parallel effect, which is that many large enterprises are actively looking for strong players in the next tier down to provide back-up, since the facilities are now too important to fail.

Transmission distance is a proxy for latency

The tool gauges the distances that complex networks cover between the sites that enterprises want to have interacting closely with their data centre. “Latency matters,” he says, so the task is to throw all the transmission links into an algorithm to work out which data centre offers the best overall proximity. 

It’s attractiveness can then be gauged along with price, ability to expand, reliability and so on when a datacenter choice is being made. 

“The CSPs are expanding to get closer to corporate enterprises that they’re not close to now. So it’s not just a question of size there is also reach. That said the key big centres are always going to prosper simply because they are the biggest and everyone is already there. It’s incredibly complex.”

One of the objectives for many players looking to make a better offer to enterprise customers around multiple cloud services, says Greg, is to get to the point, where they can say “meet me at a data centre and then we will handle the rest.” 

That Network-as-a-Service’ from within the cloud for multi cloud is certainly what many players see as the big opportunity, he says.