Equinix Provides Amazon AWS Direct Connect to Customers in the Asia-Pacific

Equinix Inc, a provider of global data center services, has teamed up with Amazon to deliver more innovative cloud services through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect. This partnership will enable their customers in Asia-Pacific region to connect directly to Amazon’s public cloud services by establishing private network connections. Direct Connect is now available in the company’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in Tokyo and Singapore.

Aside from the two aforementioned cities, the service is currently offered by Equinix in greater Washington DC/Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. These four locations will provide connectivity to AWS US East (Northern Virginia) Region, AWS US West (Northern California) Region and AWS Asia-Pacific Region.

Customers’ network costs will be reduced since they will only need to pay for the network ports used and data transferred out of AWS. Data transfer into AWS, meanwhile, is free. The bandwidth commitments to Internet Service Providers (ISP) will be reduced, throughput will increase, and network performance will be more consistent than internet-based connections. In a nutshell, the service offers more cost-effective and secure high volume data transfers, direct storage connectivity, and concurrent access to public and private resources.

After successfully setting up its Virginia datacenter campus in 2011, Equinix has been expanding AWS Direct Connect to other locations and regions to address growing customer expectation for hybrid environments between customer-owned, dedicated, managed infrastructure and cloud infrastructure.

With this, a managed hosting provider can utilize AWS Direct Connect in Equinix data centers for their own customers to use a mix between their hosting services and Amazon cloud. The demand for this kind of services is growing rapidly, with the rising popularity of cloud computing and virtualization. Chris Sharp, Equinix Vice President of Interconnection & Services Innovation shares how the company facilitates connections between users and cloud providers.

With AWS Direct Connect inside Equinix data centers, customers can directly touch the cloud. Many customers can now take advantage of the cost savings of cloud computing. With our successful collaboration with Amazon, Equinix is becoming the de facto ‘cloud hub.’

Typically, a cross-connect setup will be available within 72 hours, and all customers need is to specify is how many connections they need, and the port size (1 Gbps or 10 Gbps). As converged infrastructures are somewhat inevitable, both providers and end-users will reap off the benefit of having a single rack of network equipment at their preferred providers, and cross-connect directly and flexibly to all of their desired cloud suppliers.