Hi Steve, Thanks for this – it sounds like you have a perfectly workable solution for this, and indeed for all the vendors. In fact, aside from the ‘reseller of a reseller’ element, it’s certainly going to be more cost-effective than going direct to all the locations.
I guess for us it is just a question of whether or not we wish to do this ‘in partnership with’ or ‘direct’ with each vendor. I appreciate all the feedback, I’m going to put this back to my people who were looking into this internally here and let them pick it up as they see fit. So thanks again! Robert Williams Custodian Data Centres https://www.CustodianDC.com From: Stephen Wilcox [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 21 November 2017 13:24 To: Clive Stone <[email protected]> Cc: Robert Williams <[email protected]>; [email protected] Subject: Re: [uknof] AWS/GCP/Azure On 21 November 2017 at 11:36, Clive Stone <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 21 Nov 2017, at 10:09, Robert Williams <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi All, I’m uncertain if this is an appropriate place to ask, but here goes. First, some necessary context: We are a rackspace/colocation, IP Transit and Ethernet services provider; and due to the location of our primary site (in Maidstone, outside of London) we find ourselves providing a lot of reasonable-capacity circuits (1G/10G) for customers between Maidstone and <random location or DC in London> on a regular basis. This is achieved using our own DWDM ring into London and back, and enables us to remain competitively priced for comms solutions where customers are looking to relocate outside of London. Now, we have an increasing number of customers requesting interconnection services into AWS, GCP and Azure. Each of which has various ‘zones’ or ‘regions’ or whatever flavour they label it. But they are all in specific facilities and have specific interconnect points. As a result of this, we are running lots of small links/tails into individual locations for individual customers ‘cloud’ interconnects. This is very inefficient (and unnecessarily costly) for everyone involved; it would be much easier if we just had a few 10G ports into the 3 different providers and broke off vlans per-customer. As an existing LINX reseller partner, we already do exactly this and it works really well. Delivery is (almost) immediate, 3rd party circuit costs are reduced/eliminated and bandwidth can be adjusted on demand. We have no intention (or desire) to actually provide or manage any of the services within these various clouds ourselves – nor do we wish to offer any cloud-based solutions ourselves. This is (typically) what our direct customers are doing; and they are the ones providing the end-users with the complete solutions and we have no interest in competing with our own customers of course. All we wish to do is to get the physical interconnections pre-provisioned with all of the relevant providers and then be able to (reasonably quickly) breakout vlans, per-customer, as a new order comes in. Someone on my team has been looking into this and, thus far, has been unable to find how this is actually achieved. However, they have found plenty of information on how to become a solutions partner or a reseller-integrator (i.e. buying cloud resources, adding your software/product or management solution and then re-selling to the client) – but nothing about just “getting a port” so you can enable the customer to pick up their existing services and backhaul them to their racks. I am not saying we have done an exhaustive search by any means, but since we have a need to move forwards with this quite quickly, I thought I’d take a leap and ask on here as I imagine many of you have already been through this and may know the quickest route. Happy for either direct responses or on-list, whatever you feel is appropriate. Thanks for reading! Rob Robert Williams Custodian Data Centres https://www.CustodianDC.com<https://www.custodiandc.com/> Apart from the overly “sales pitch like” email (which I will be honest, almost got lost as spam) - this is what IX Reach can do easily. Tried speaking to them? They interconnect with the Cloud providers, and you can buy the port from them and split it off how you like. Steve is on this list, too. Maybe ask hem… I’m sure other providers can do it, but that’s the one I’d go to first. Thanks Clive.. Rob, basically you XC to us and then order the direct connects to AWS/Google/Azure to any geographical region (we have Europe, North America, Asia) .. and we hand them off as VLANs. The customer uses their existing account with the cloud provider for the services and to request the Direct Connect and then they select us as their provider at the chosen location.. Cheers Steve
