This article was originally published on www.chattanoogan.com.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
DC BLOX has completed the latest phase of its fiber optic network installation between its data centers in Atlanta and Chattanooga with network connectivity to 56 Marietta St. DC BLOX is a provider of interconnected edge computing data centers and carrier class network service.
DC BLOX’s fiber optic infrastructure is an 8.8 Tb per second network. The new capacity provides customers at both data centers with lightning fast, low-latency connectivity with geo-redundant paths and links them to the Southeast’s largest Internet Exchange.
“The goal for the network at DC BLOX is to create a distributed data center environment for our customers,” said Jeff Wabik, chief network and strategy officer at DC BLOX. “That means that the connectivity between all our data centers is so fast and abundant that applications can be distributed across them with minimal concern for latency and performance impacts.”
The Atlanta and Chattanooga data centers are an effective disaster recovery pair. With more than 100 miles between them, they meet a best practice for geographic diversity for potential natural disasters – if something happens in one location, the data is secure in a backup location.
DC BLOX’s 100 Gb per second connections from its Atlanta and Chattanooga data centers to the facility at 56 Marietta St. enable connectivity to more than 150 network, telecom and cloud providers. For customers who cannot acquire space at this major U.S. interconnection point because of its high occupancy, DC BLOX provides near-site colocation services.
Average latency between DC BLOX’s Atlanta data center and the 56 Marietta St. location is 0.103 milliseconds, and Atlanta to Chattanooga is 1.71 milliseconds.
DC BLOX colocation customers can purchase Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet LAN services connecting them to other DC BLOX data centers, to premise-based locations and to cloud providers using DC BLOX’s soon-to-be-available Cloud Ramp service.
The DC BLOX wholly owned fiber network uses Ciena’s converged packet optical and packet networking products to provide fully protected redundant routes with unprecedented scale and performance. Ciena’s 6500 and 8700 platforms add greater network automation, control and service delivery for customers in the southeastern United States.
“DC BLOX is creating the next generation of software-defined data centers, bringing huge improvements in scale and responsiveness for latency sensitive enterprise applications,” said Bruce Hembree, vice president and general manager of North America sales at Ciena. “DC BLOX’s vision will change the paradigm for customers harnessing the capabilities of multi-cloud environments and bringing self-serve, on-demand resources that will adapt to the real-time needs of enterprise, research and education applications.”
DC BLOX plans to extend its data center footprint into Huntsville and Birmingham, Ala. in 2018 and will provide high-speed network connectivity with the Atlanta and Chattanooga locations.