IIX Console to Automate Cross-Connects in vXchnge Data Centers

vXchnge, a data center provider targeting secondary US markets, has partnered with IIX to make its automated network connectivity provisioning platform available to its customers, the companies announced this week.

The platform, called Console, addresses the problem of complexity in establishing direct network links between data center users and their partners, customers, or service providers, be their servers in the same data center or a facility elsewhere. Even within the same data center, provisioning these cross-connects requires heavy-duty network engineering skills, which most data center customers don’t have in-house. Console’s software automates the process, making it a lot easier.

Demand for direct network links between a variety of data center users is growing. Enterprises use private links to connect to public cloud providers, for example, while service providers may need to connect to other service providers as they devise combined offerings.

In November, IIX raised $26 million from a group of Silicon Valley’s venture capital heavyweights to scale its business. The company says about 150 data centers around the world are now accessible via its Software-as-a-Service platform, which means any user with servers inside any of those 150 facilities can almost instantly provision a private network connection to any other user in the network.

The partnership between IIX and vXchnge covers the data center provider’s facilities in Austin, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Silicon Valley, and New Jersey but may expand to more locations in the future, vXchnge announced this week.

In recent years, vXchnge has been positioning itself as an edge data center provider, pursuing data center markets aren’t known for high concentration of data centers.

As more media content moves online and as companies use more and more cloud services, there’s rising demand for data center capacity in those secondary markets for the purpose of caching content for delivery to local end users. Edge data centers save content providers money in network transport fees they otherwise have to pay to carry content from the big internet hubs, such as New York or Los Angeles, to end users over long distances every time the users request it.

Read more: How Edge Data Center Providers are Changing the Internet's Geography

In a big expansion push last year, vXchnge launched a new data center in Philadelphia and acquired eight data centers in secondary US markets from Sungard Availability Services.