How PhoenixNAP’s bare metal PoP in American Tower data center connects to bigger picture
Cloud and infrastructure service provider PhoenixNAP announced the launch of its bare-metal cloud edge location in Austin, Texas. The company’s equipment is being deployed at an American Tower edge data center that will provide low latency access of 10 milliseconds for bare metal cloud out of locations in the United States Southwest.
Leveraging the availability of Megaport Cloud Router (MCR), PhoenixNAP is able to route the traffic from edge locations to PhoenixNAP’s other data centers within the United State while maintaining application performance. PhoenixNAP’s enterprise customers can access Megaport’s software-defined networking solution to create virtualized private networks for efficient multi-cloud management.
Bare metal cloud instances at edge locations are particularly well suited to data-intensive workloads involving 5G as a transport network, executives said.
“5G workloads are the future of business, and we are adapting our service offering to meet market demands,” said Ian McClarty, president of PhoenixNAP in a prepared statement. “Through our edge installation, we will provide low-latency access to Bare Metal Cloud out of most locations in the U.S. Southwest, enabling users to streamline latency-sensitive and high-bandwidth applications,” he noted.
Bare metal cloud services are increasingly being offered as an alternative to dedicated servers as they are a non-virtualized environment (for better performance) with the scalability of cloud service. In terms of cost for resources, bare-metal cloud has flexible billing options as they enable you to pay on-demand on a usage basis, while in the case of dedicated servers customers would have to sign monthly or yearly contracts for equipment that isn’t always fully utilized.
Analysis
There’s a segment of customers using bare-metal cloud services who will also be candidates for applications that need proximity to end-users and wireless networks; gaming companies and OTT video services are ones that come to mind.
Partnering with American Tower is a logical step towards extending BMaaS to the access network edge. This is an important step for the company but should be understood in the context of other recent moves such as:
- Partnering with SaaS firm CloudGenera, a cloud management platform provider that is used to evaluate workload placement based on cost, technology and business context. PhoenixNAP gains exposure to a wider market for its services by being visible on these types of platforms.
- Adding support for managed Kubernetes, based on SUSE Rancher, on its bare metal cloud service. Kubernetes is one of the main container orchestration tools of choice for edge applications. Managed K8s services will ease the challenges of running applications at the edge while PhoenixNAP provides the underlying infrastructure as well.
- DE-CIX co-located its fifth internet exchange at PhoenixNAP’s Phoenix, Arizona facility, forming an interconnection ring with DE-CIX New York, Dallas, Chicago and Richmond to serve the entire continental US. In terms of connectivity, the IX operator has another 24 PoPs in cities across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia
In other words, PhoenixNAP’s strategy goes beyond just putting infrastructure in prime locations in core and edge data centers. Enterprise customers can look to PhoenixNAP for a broader set of capabilities such as managed Kubernetes while also enabling customers to move data and workloads from core cloud to edge on a global basis through partnerships with DE-CIX and Megaport.
Jim Davis, Managing Editor, Edge Industry Review
Article Topics
5G | American Tower | BMaaS | edge data center | edge orchestration | Kubernetes | phoenixNAP
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