The ambitious project has seen the combination of both Fluidata’s core networks to create an enhanced Service Exchange Platform, designed to deal with immediate and increasing demand from customers and partners for 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s services and to offer customers 100 Gb/s ports when needed. The combined network will dramatically increase Fluidata’s core network capacity – essential in dealing with this demand and a growing number of fibre technologies currently being deployed for customers and partners.
The network is unique in that it connects into over 15 DSL and fibre carriers across the UK and delivers services to over 50 ISPs along with Fluidata’s direct customers and partners. It also allows faster and cheaper communications between Fluidata’s nine UK datacentres including Telehouse North, Telehouse East, Sovereign House, Harbour Exchange Square 8/9 and London Hosting Centre.
For businesses, Private Clouds will be easier to setup and manage, without needing expensive hardware at each customer site. The network will be able to deliver customers a complete end-to-end customised solution alongside a robust Service Level Agreement (SLA). The benefit for corporate customers is the ability to use the best technology available to them, irrespective of the last-mile operator, all from one network, managed and maintained by Fluidata.
Piers Daniell, MD, Fluidata said: “Our customers want a host of new network-centric services – fibre, line-bonding, failover as well as cloud services – and so we have to be able to deliver as much bandwidth as a customer wants, wherever they want it and at a competitive price. And if they want all their sites pushed into a dedicated private cloud we have to be able to do that in an instant for them too. The new Service Exchange Platform builds in the functionality and capacity we need to deliver this, and we will have slots available for 100 Gb/s services for when customers are ready to take them.”
After a significant period of consultation with major hardware manufacturers Juniper were selected for the core backbone infrastructure and Cisco for high-capacity DSL aggregation. Piers Daniell, MD Fluidata comments on the decision to work with these vendors: “We already use Juniper and Cisco throughout our core networks. It was clear Juniper equipment could offer the best return on our investment in terms of features and capacity on the core network, whilst Cisco presented an unmatched pedigree when it comes to DSL aggregation. We were also impressed with the levels of support we receive from both manufacturers when resolving technical issues.”
Planning has already started and the new hardware equipment will be rolled out over the coming month before the Olympic freeze. Deployment of the new network will be complete in November and all existing customer services will be migrated on to the new platform by the end of March 2013.