For many years data has been its own currency. It is both the origin of today’s digital economy and a stalwart for – so-called – traditional industries whose existence and ambitions rest on the ability to harness data to underpin their future.
Whether you’re a tech company offering cloud services, software as a service (SaaS), or an online platform, your success will heavily depend on data center connectivity. The same can be said in financial services, where banks, investment firms, and insurance companies require low-latency connections to data centers to support real-time trading, data analysis, and risk assessment. Whether it’s hospitals, clinics, or telemedicine providers, the healthcare we rely on today is itself reliant on data center connectivity to store and transfer patient records, diagnostic images, and telehealth consultations. In education, institutes of learning need data center connectivity for e-learning platforms, student information systems, and research databases.
No matter the industry, data center connectivity is essential for any organization that needs to store, process, and transfer data efficiently and securely. It can improve operational efficiency, support growth, and enhance the overall customer experience.
A Driver for Business Growth
Data center connectivity is crucial in helping businesses scale by providing the necessary infrastructure to support growth and expansion. This is especially true of bandwidth-intensive workloads and latency-sensitive applications found in cloud computing, storage replication, data backup and migration, content distribution, and disaster recovery solutions. All face increasing demand for high-capacity connectivity between the organization itself and the data center.
With scalable network infrastructure, a data center can grow to accommodate increasing data traffic, additional users, and growing workloads. For example, network infrastructure can be enhanced to accommodate port density and modular design, ensuring support for the growing demands with ease of management. Furthermore, they can upgrade their data center connectivity to higher bandwidth options as needed, ensuring that data can be transmitted quickly and efficiently. This flexibility for expansion is especially important for data-intensive operations, such as streaming, big data analysis, and cloud-based services.
Also important are redundancy and failover mechanisms to ensure uninterrupted service, which is essential for businesses to maintain their operations and customer satisfaction as they scale.
Data center connectivity supports business scalability by providing the necessary infrastructure, reliability, and flexibility to meet the growing demands of an expanding operation. Whether a business is increasing its customer base, expanding into new markets, or introducing new services, robust and scalable data center connectivity is an essential component for business growth.
What Tier (I-IV) Data Center Does Your Business Need?
Data centers are often categorized into different tiers based on their infrastructure and capabilities. The four main tiers are Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, and Tier IV, with each offering a different level of availability and redundancy.
- Tier I data centers are suitable for small businesses, startups, or those with minimal IT infrastructure. This tier provides limited redundancy and availability, with an expected uptime of around 99.671% (28.8 hours of downtime per year), and offers a basic infrastructure for power and cooling.
- Tier II data centers are appropriate for small to medium-sized businesses such as small eCommerce startups. These provide an expected uptime of around 99.749% (22 hours of downtime per year) and enhanced infrastructure for power and cooling.
- Tier III data centers are ideal for medium to large businesses, including many enterprise-level operations. This tier offers a higher level of redundancy and availability, with an expected uptime of approximately 99.982% (1.6 hours of downtime per year). These data centers provide multiple paths for power and cooling, allowing for maintenance without service disruption.
- Tier IV data centers are designed for mission-critical operations and large enterprises (e.g. large financial institutions, cloud service providers, and healthcare providers) that require the highest levels of availability. This level provides the highest redundancy and availability, with an expected uptime of approximately 99.995% (less than an hour of downtime per year)—fully fault-tolerant infrastructure with multiple active power and cooling distribution paths.
In practice, the choice of data center tier should align with your business’s needs, budget, and risk tolerance. It’s important to note that data center tier classification is one of many considerations. Factors such as location, scalability, security, compliance, and connectivity also play a significant role in selecting the right data center for a particular business.
FiberLight’s Data Center Connectivity Offerings
With 20 years of dedicated experience designing, engineering, and optimizing large-scale fiber networks, growth-oriented businesses have long trusted FiberLight’s regional expertise and enjoy higher-touch, personalized account management and dependable customer service. In addition, customers can be assured that FiberLight’s new fiber, built in the last three to four years, offers diversity from Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILEC) and cable companies or Multiple Systems Operators (MSOs) and Cable MSO providers on fully owned, operated, and managed network, built completely through organic growth. The benefits of FiberLight’s data center connectivity offerings include:
- Increase Performance and Scale for bandwidth-intensive applications with efficient use of 10Gbps,100Gbps, and 400Gbps wave services and expandable equipment to maximize bandwidth availability.
- Faster Turn-Up – Choose the bandwidth to support your business now and into the future with easily scalable bandwidth options up to 10 Gbps.
- Increased Reliability – Experience improved connections and service reliability with routes that are designed to eliminate points of failure and sources of latency between your data center locations.
- Savings on Cross Connects – Reduce the number of cross-connections required within the data center locations with larger 10Gbps, 100Gbps, and 400Gbps circuits.
- High-Touch Customer Service – Easy access to top executive and field resources, offering a more personalized experience for delivering ongoing account management and service maintenance.
FiberLight’s Data Center Interconnect
To stay competitive today’s businesses must be digital businesses. There’s an ongoing need for continuous bandwidth growth and predictable costs to scale for network operators, data centers, cloud service providers, and content delivery networks.
Instead of bonding together multiple 1Gbps or 10Gbps circuits to accommodate escalating track growth, organizations can increase network efficiency while decreasing the cost with a higher capacity of 100Gbps and 400Gbps wavelength connection. Whether you’re increasing workloads to a data center or migrating between two data centers, achieve your business goals faster with Data Center Interconnect from FiberLight.
FiberLight Delivers
- Core backbone Ethernet capacity of 100Gbps and beyond, Wavelengths of 10G, 100G, and 400G, and Dark Fiber solutions.
- Next Gen Equipment – Expansion capabilities to support any customer requirements
- Customization – Custom fiber paths built to customer specifications
- Density
- Ability to stand up lit capacity and strands for dark fiber requirements
- Up to 1,728 strands in key metros and routes
- Key metro market overbuilds underway to expand density
- Diversity
- Diverse entrances into buildings (where available)
- Multiple diverse backbone paths to data centers
- Depths
- Nearly 90 percent of fiber is 3.5’ deep underground vs just under the surface (micro-trenching) or aerial like ILECs and MSOs
Data center connectivity supports business scalability by providing the necessary infrastructure, reliability, and flexibility to meet the growing demands of an expanding operation. Whether a business is increasing its customer base, expanding into new markets, or introducing new services, robust and scalable data center connectivity is an essential component for success.
Learn more about FiberLight’s data center connectivity solutions at https://www.fiberlight.com/fiber-services/data-center-interconnect/.