Equinix Lays Down London-Based AWS Direct Connect Service

Equinix is offering businesses the ability to hook up with Amazon Web Services Direct Connect from its London data centre.

AWS Direct Connect is a feature that lets users establish a dedicated network connection between from their premises directly to AWS.

AWS Direct Connect availability in London makes the city the second location in Europe to offer the feature with Equinix. Customers are able to use the whole range of AWS cloud offerings with Direct Connect, and improves upon the previous Equinix solution of using AWS from AWS’ Dublin data centre.

Growth

Ryan Mallory, vice president, technology at Equinix, said that the move comes in response to a significant growth in enterprise customers.

“Our goal is to provide these customers with the ability to realise the full benefits of the cloud – without worrying about application latency or cost issues,” said Mallory.

“AWS Direct Connect makes it easy for companies to establish a dedicated network connection from Equinix to AWS, which ultimately reduces network costs, increases throughput, and provides a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.”

Outage

However, one particular AWS Direct Connect service failed in London last week as data centre provider Telecity suffered a two-day outage.

Telecity, which was bought by Equinix (with the buyout winning regulatory approval this month), reportedly suffered two back-to-back power outage at its Sovereign House data centre in the London Docklands.

Telecity has not responded to TechWeekEurope’s request for comment at the time of publishing.

On Tuesday November 17, AWS posted an update about the situation. The cloud firm said: “We can confirm intermittent packet loss between the Direct Connect location at TelecityGroup, London Docklands, and the EU-WEST-1 Region.

“An external facility providing Direct Connect connectivity to the EU-WEST-1 Region has experienced power loss.”

Take our data centre quiz here!