CyrusOne has announced an enablement platform for the cloud, branded the “Sky for the Cloud.” This platform provides a home for the cloud in a customized data hall, designed for maximizing power usage effectiveness (PUE), and interconnectionto an ecosystem of business partners, content providers, networks, carriers, Internet service providers, and Ethernet buyers and sellers. Nirvanix is the first customer to leverage this platform to provide unlimited cloud storage capacity to its customers for back-up, archival and large-scale content collaboration.
“The rapid adoption of the cloud, both public and private has created more pressure on the data center’s performance,” said Josh Snowhorn, vice president and general manager of Interconnection, CyrusOne. “The cloud requires redundancy in data center power infrastructure, connectivity and capacity on demand. We created this platform, to truly enable the performance of the cloud by designing dedicated data halls that are well-suited for the cloud.”
With CyrusOne’s Sky for the Cloud interconnection and peering offering, customers are afforded further freedom of choice about how to build out their capacity. Now a customer can look to use CyrusOne’s bandwidth marketplace, Internet Exchange Platform or a cross-connect to tap into Nirvanix cloud storage services.
“Our move into interconnection and peering creates the ecosystem that enables our customers to share data with each other from the home base of our reliable and efficient facilities that they have already grown to trust,” said Snowhorn. “The addition of Nirvanix to our facility is another milestone in delivering on that promise, by enabling customers that might be apprehensive about a full transition to the cloud with a low-risk point of entry to test the waters one application at a time, while still keeping a majority of their IT infrastructure uninterrupted.”
Trusted to provide flexibility and reliable high-density power and cooling to its facilities, Nirvanix chose CyrusOne’s Lewisville facility because of its redundant power (2N architecture), power-density infrastructure and energy efficiency.
“To provide our customers with enterprise-class cloud storage, we need to have the highest standards of quality of service across all of the touch points—from the network, to the data center provider, to our environment. Our capacity expansion at CyrusOne gives our customers the reassurance that the facilities are operating under the same quality of power, cooling, and security that they have grown accustomed to and have come to expect from their own IT systems,” said Scott Genereux, president and CEO of Nirvanix. “Our customers benefit from CyrusOne’s ‘Sky for the Cloud’ enablement platform and Internet exchange, which means better backup and archival performance and a substantial reduction in network-connection expenses.”
The onboarding of Nirvanix in Lewisville is just the first formal step in the company’s Sky for the Cloud interconnection and peering offering for its customers. Peering in the Dallas facility allows customers to pull content from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the data center, more quickly and affordably delivering access to content providers. The build-out of this offering will eventually move from facility-specific connections in Dallas to a full, statewide Internet exchange later this year, linking Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio data centers to one another. It will be the first statewide peering exchange in the country.
“Just as all other facets of CyrusOne’s relationship with its customers are customizable, our evolving interconnection and peering capability will allow customers to connect with business partners, content providers, networks, carriers, Internet service providers, and Ethernet buyers and sellers on a local, regional, or global scale,” said Snowhorn.