By Dr. Beate Konrad, Product Manager – Connectivity
At NEXTDC, we aspire to be the leading customer‐centric data centre services company. This means delivering solutions that power, secure and connect enterprise and Government customers.
We are, however, about more than just products. We are constantly looking for new ways to help our customers meet their key challenges against the backdrop of an accelerating digital revolution. We know this requires continual improvement and the development of solutions that enable flexibility and diversity within the data centre environment, as well as optimised resilience in mission-critical operational settings.
To meet this need, we have extended the functionality of AXON and launched NEXTDC Internet – yet another value-add for our customers that will help ensure critical resilience against a backdrop of substantial domestic and international data security and sovereignty disruption.
NEXTDC Internet services provide customers with on-demand, secure and highly reliable access to the Internet from anywhere our AXON virtual connectivity platform reaches. This includes all our facilities nationally as well as key third-party facilities where prominent cloud zones are available.
With an AXON port enabled, your Internet access can now be fully integrated into the service so you have a unified, single interface solution covering rack-to-rack connectivity, cloud connectivity and the Internet. Alternatively, if you just need internet connectivity from your NEXTDC-hosted infrastructure, this service reduces complexity in management and billing.
In short, the service will facilitate access to everything that is on the World Wide Web – as opposed to the point-to-point connectivity you typically see in a data centre setting. But most importantly, this Internet access is governed by the benchmarks that are associated with locating infrastructure within the NEXTDC security, resilience and performance perimeter.
If you’d like to find out more about the critical role AXON has to play in optimising your interconnection strategy, have a look at a recent article from our Head of Networks: Six questions to ponder about optimising data connectivity strategy for data-in-motion.
Customers have the flexibility to choose internet services from 25Mbps to 10Gbps. There are two main scenarios where you can potentially create cost and process efficiencies from NEXTDC Internet:
Out Of Band is a small-capacity service for accessing hardware outside of the usual method – a ‘side door’ to a rack. It can be used for monitoring your network and hardware; managing and configuring your hardware remotely; and as fallback when your primary service fails and access is required to troubleshoot the issue.
IP Transit is a higher-grade service which can be used as the primary internet path – a ‘main door’ to a rack. It can be used for high-volume traffic; constant data transmission to and from other locations; and connectivity to any server, anywhere.
NEXTDC Internet services are not intended to replace your primary Internet Service Provider, but they can, however, certainly take some of the headache out of finding a secondary provider to support your outsourced data centre footprint.
In a world of chaos and complexity, there is genuine convenience in being able to leverage a trusted existing partner to extend the existing services scope quickly and seamlessly. It makes sense to take the path of least resistance to turn on critical internet access with appropriate levels of security and resilience as a service add-on as opposed to bringing another supplier into the mix within a third-party hosted DC environment.
The management of internet service becomes less complex when you know you can trust it to deliver:
Built as an overlay for our AXON virtual connectivity platform, customers looking to access internet securely from their infrastructure colocated with NEXTDC have two variants to choose from.
A stand-alone service comes as a bundle including internet access, a dedicated AXON port, and a cross-connect to AXON in a NEXTDC facility. Customers merely order the service via the AXON portal and the service will be automatically placed on the work order list of our Remote Hands tech team. This has proven a popular extension of connectivity services delivered by NEXTDC, reducing supply chain and integration complexities.
However, if you’re an existing customer with an AXON port already enabled, you’re nearly there! You can order services with up to 1Gbps bandwidth directly via the AXON portal with the service provisioning automated almost instantly. Internet services with higher bandwidth can be ordered via your NEXTDC sales representative.
Reach out if you would like to find out more about how to reduce complexity and improve performance of all connectivity underpinning your unique Hybrid IT architecture.