Google Cloud Makes Direct Connection Service Faster, Inks Equinix Deal to Expand Network

Google's cloud services team has made improvements to the way traffic of customers using its Dedicated Interconnect service (launched in September) gets routed across Google's global network and signed a new partnership with Equinix to get the service into more data center locations around the world.

As the name implies, Dedicated Interconnect offers dedicated direct connections via fiber cable between on-premises data centers and Google Cloud Platform. Because they're popular with enterprise customers, all of the major public cloud providers offer direct connections, both from on-premises and select colocation centers.

Direct connections offer the advantages of speed and security. Since traffic doesn't have to travel across the public internet, it's not susceptible to being snagged by black hats, nor does it have to fight for available bandwidth. For companies that regularly transfer massive amounts of data there can be financial benefits as well, in the form of lower bandwidth costs.

Although speed and latency are automatically improved with a direct connection, the first of today's announced updates deals with the speed data travels across Google's cloud. This is important both to accommodate connected devices and because the cloud is now often a large part of an organization's private network.

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Dedicated Interconnect now supports Cloud Router Global Routing, which allows subnets in GCP to be accessible from any on-premises network through the Google network. In simple English, this makes it easier to find the shortest route from start to finish across Google's cloud. This was always possible through manually configured static routing, which worked well for things like office-to-office routing but not so well for connected devices with constantly changing end points. With Cloud Router, the routing happens automatically and on the fly.

The second item is more of an expansion than an upgrade. GCP has added four colocation data center locations to the Dedicated Interconnect circle: Mumbai, Munich, Montreal, and Atlanta. In addition, the cloud provider has entered into a partnership with Equinix, the world's leading colocation data center provider by market share, to bring GCP direct connection access to areas where the cloud provider doesn't have a physical presence.

"By providing direct access to Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect, we are helping enterprises leverage Google’s network -- the largest in the world -- and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategies globally," Ryan Mallory, a VP at Equinix, said in a statement. "Dedicated Interconnect offered in collaboration with Equinix enables customers to easily build the cloud of their choice with dedicated, low-latency connections and SLAs that enterprise customers have come to expect from hybrid cloud architectures."

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According to John Veizades, the direct service's product manager, Dedicated Interconnect can be configured to offer a 99.9 percent or a 99.99 percent uptime SLA, and is now available and ready for production-grade workloads.