Megaport Brings Azure to EdgeConneX’s Portland Data Center

EdgeConnex, a data center provider that specializes in edge data centers, has partnered with Megaport, an Australian connectivity services provider that automates the process of interconnection between various companies in colocation data centers using its proprietary software platform.

Megaport will set up shop in EdgeConneX’s data center in the Portland, Oregon, market to offer the facility’s customers connectivity to a multitude of service providers, including Microsoft Azure, a key player for EdgeConneX, which is pursuing a strategy of providing access to direct network links to the big cloud providers in edge data center markets where it isn’t already available.

EdgeConneX announced availability of Amazon Web Services Direct Connect at its Portland data center last week. The facility became the first physical location in that market from where companies could get a direct private network link to Amazon’s cloud. Access to Azure via Megaport is another piece of the puzzle.

Read more: EdgeConneX Brings the Edge of Amazon’s Cloud to Portland

After quickly building out a substantial data center fleet across secondary US markets over the last two years and positioning itself as an edge data center provider in the sense that it offered data center capacity and network connectivity for online content caching in places that were otherwise being served that content from remote hubs on core internet markets, EdgeConneX is now focusing on extending the “edge” of the public clouds.

Before AWS Direct Connect became available in Portland, for example, the closest places where customers in Portland could access the service from were Seattle, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. West Coast availability of Azure ExpressRoute, a service similar to Direct Connect, which offers direct links to Microsoft’s cloud that bypass the public internet, has been limited to the same locations.

The focus on cloud is “the next logical step” in the development of EdgeConneX, Phil Lawson-Shanks, the company’s chief architect and VP of innovation, said. “The core is well served for the cloud,” he said, referring to the core internet markets like Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia, which have huge clusters of data centers operated by the cloud providers themselves and colocation companies, like Equinix or CoreSite, that offer private connectivity to those data centers.

EdgeConneX leadership believes we’re seeing the start of a move by either the cloud providers themselves or service providers like Megaport to bring that direct private network access to public clouds to metros that aren’t being served by the likes of Equinix and CoreSite.

The Megaport partnership makes the EdgeConneX facility in Portland an access point to much more than Azure, however. Using its SDN platform, Megaport offers the ability to quickly provision connections to any of the company’s 250 service providers or enterprise customers, including, in addition to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, AWS, Rackspace, and CloudFlare.

Location-wise, Megaport has extensive presence in data centers around North America and Asia Pacific.

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