Amazon Adds Invitations to its Cloud Party
Amazon made another auspicious announcement on Tuesday. Its Direct Connect network service which allows companies to communicate to its cloud has four new locations. These are CoreSite One Wilshire in Los Angeles, TelecityGroup Sovereign House in London and Equinix in Singapore and in Tokyo. The two existing locations are both in the U.S.
An alternative to using the public Internet, AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud services, Direct Connect is a dedicated network connection. Companies may use Direct Connect, networking from their office, data center or colocation facility to an AWS Region. According to Amazon, Direct Connect offers consistent network performance for applications that require real-time data enhanced privacy for customers who have security or compliance policies that prevent them from connecting to the cloud using VPN. .
When enterprises connect directly to an AWS region, they will reduce their network costs, improve bandwidth throughput and this will increase reliability and offer a smoother, more fluid experience than is probable across the internet.
How will cost be decreased? Amazon enumerates. By "transferring data to and from AWS directly, companies will reduce their bandwidth commitment to their internet service provider. Subsequently, data transferred over the dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than internet data transfer rates."
Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics analyst, thought that customers would be happy with Direct Connect because of bandwidth issues in the cloud.
"Relying on the public internet for core application connectivity introduces a degree of variability and uncertainty around bandwidth, speed and latency that is unacceptable to many large organisations, who are increasingly putting the emphasis on end-to-end quality of service management."
To connect, enterprises can choose between 1Gbps and 10Gbps Ethernet ports. Companies that want more capacity can provision multiple connections.
To begin using Direct Connect, clients fill in a form indicating their connection requirements, then Amazon will contact them. For the cloud service Amazon charges 30 cents per hour for a 1Gbps port and $2.25 per hour for a 10Gbps and between $0.02 and $0.045 per gigabyte of data transferred out of its cloud.
Amazon will be increasing the number of Direct Connect locations globally in 2012, however, the company was not forthcoming about its time frame.
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