Colt's Blog

As companies increasingly use a mixture of cloud services to support their IT function, the reliance on both IP VPN and Carrier Ethernet has also grown. While IP VPN’s approach to service has been well defined it was only last year that the Metro Ethernet Forum packaged together a list of standards for Carrier Ethernet and created what it called CE 2.0. The standardisation was an important one, the MEF’s recommended settings for the priority of traffic ensures that there is much greater consistency in the delivery from Carrier Ethernet.

CE is the method of choice for higher performance apps. Its lower cost per bit combined with increased scalability make it a smarter choice over legacy systems, however the question of definition around traffic types has always been an issue, the Class of Service solves that problem. Traditionally though carriers haven’t seen Class of Service as a top priority for their own service delivery. At Colt, we really think that shouldn’t be the case. Class of Service allows for greater overall control and supervision of the traffic flow and that is something that a simple bandwidth upgrade can’t mitigate.

Increased granularity of the detail available to network managers will allow them to get more accurate measures of the applications and traffic demand independent of the access or network transport they are using. For business that will be increasingly reliant on cloud-delivered apps and big data this will be vital to ensure that there is continuation of business.

Eventually we will progress towards a Carrier Ethernet/IP VPN hybrid model, which will deliver the best of both technologies. For the time being Colt has offered Class of Service as a key point of its Carrier Ethernet portfolio and will continue to follow the CE 2.0 definitions. To find out more about how Class of Service could deliver increased reliability for your network then please speak to a Colt representative.

On Friday we received the great news that Colt was recognised with the VMware Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Competency Partner of the Year award for the EMEA region. We’ve also qualified as one of three finalists for the Global VMware Partner Network Award in the same category.  Results of the global awards will be announced at the Partner Exchange event in February.

What an exciting start to 2013. As I said in my last blog, just two weeks ago my colleagues Jon Bennett and Gideon Wilkins accepted the VMware Service Provider Programme partner of the year 2012 award for UK & Ireland on behalf of Colt.

These awards reflect Colt’s ability to combine VMware and managed service expertise with network and datacentre infrastructure to deliver innovative services to direct and indirect customers with vCloud Datacenter Services at the centre, as part of our IT managed services portfolio.

We look forward to joining the VMware partner community in February and collecting the EMEA award which recognises the continued hard work of all of our team to deliver flexible services that help our customers across Europe address the ongoing business challenges of cost control, speed to market and regulation and compliance.

It’s a great start to the year for Colt. Last week my colleagues Jon Bennett and Gideon Wilkins accepted the VMware Service Provider Programme partner of the year 2012 award for UK & Ireland on behalf of Colt.

This award reflects our success in developing our vCloud based services and is testament to the true partner relationship we have with VMware, and the speed with which we are able to take these new services to market.

Colt was the first vCloud service provider in Europe two years ago and has maintained that lead by being the first service provider to implement a pan-European vCloud platform, based on the new VMware vCloud Suite 5.1. It was rolled out in four locations in Europe during 2012 and gave us the most extensive vCloud coverage in Europe, enabling customers to access enterprise cloud services from local data centres. This is important for our customers because it allows them to store their data in their operating country, addressing the myriad of compliance, taxation and IP challenges caused by the data privacy and contractual requirements associated with placing data “in the cloud” across Europe.

As this reward recognises, we continue to be committed to developing excellent vCloud based services for our customers as part of our overall cloud and IT services portfolio. We do this because we believe in the value of the technology and the support that VMware is offering to provide customers with the flexibility and scalability that today’s IT department needs to respond to business requirements. The deployment of a multi-tenant VDI platform (which won Best Desktop Virtualization project award at VMworld), a pan-European split-site solution and vCloud as Disaster Recovery are all examples of how Colt is using VMware-based solutions to enable our customers’ business.

In addition to our European roll-out, 2012 saw us engaging with IT resellers to offer vCloud to the mid-market as well as to our enterprise clients. This was a brand new approach and an example of the continued commercial innovation from Colt that has proven successful, and offered our distributor partners (Avnet/Magirus) and resellers great advantages to market.

Channel is now one of the key drivers for our roadmap. We have been developing new solutions and are working closely with VMware in order to offer our customers back-up and disaster recovery services. These prototypes were first demonstrated at VMworld Europe in Barcelona in 2012. From initial conversations with customers we know that these updates are critical offerings for the mid-market customer.

A great start to 2013. We look forward to continuing to build on this momentum with IT services that really help our customers maximise the performance of their business.

It’s one thing to develop a product from scratch that you know can transform the business of data centres, but it’s another dimension to be recognised in the industry for it.

Some 4 years ago, our design and engineering team were determined to solve some key data centre issues that we could find no solution to on the market.

Our goal: transform how datacentres were designed, delivered and operated. We wanted to:

• Lower power costs
• Increase flexibility to meet business demand
• Deploy datacentres at the speed of business rather than datacentre years
• Eliminate expensive bespoke “one-off” builds
• Create a standard design to impact maintenance, efficiency, costs, resources, uptime with consistent quality
• Flexibility to dial-up or down depending on IT requirements
• Address health and safety on datacentre builds

In 2009 we built the first prototype of what we called the modular data centre. In 2010 we brought it to the market. And in the last 18 months:

• Delivered our first data centre to a customer site
• Delivered in England, Iceland, France and the Netherlands
• Achieved Uptime Institute Tier III design certification
• Achieved management and operations stamp of approval for two sites
• Analysts in 451 said Colt’s Modular Data Centre is the quintessential prefabricated datacenter 2.0 product
• Launched our next generation, future-proofed data centre the Colt ftec, built with flex technology
• Won awards from Data Centre Europe Awards, Information Age and now this from Datacentre Dynamics

So as we enter 2013, is it the awards and accolades that fill us with enthusiasm? A little I suppose, but what really excites us is our people; the dedication, the teamwork, the camaraderie that has gone into developing, delivering and operating our data centres all around Europe. Included in that is our customers, we work so closely with them during the process that we become one team, focused on successful delivery and maximised uptime.

Today we should not just celebrate our award win but also our colleagues and customers who make it all possible and worthwhile!

With trading speeds of up to 40% faster, microwave technology looks set to be an important tool for high frequency traders in search of a competitive advantage, but it won’t lead to a wholesale technology change across the industry. There are limitations to microwave and this is why a combination of low latency fibre and microwave is the optimum solution for high frequency trading.

Microwave technology offers irrefutable speed advantages. In the US, we have already witnessed a number of microwave systems going live this year, with the route between the financial centres of Chicago and New York receiving particular attention. Trading desks have reported tangible hits on their fill rates when other market participants go live with microwave services, driving demand for the IT department to investigate how microwave services can be used alongside existing ultra low latency services.

Line of sight advantage

The chief advantage of microwave is its ability to travel point-to-point, or what is optimistically referred to as “line of sight”. Put simply, this is where the data is transmitted across the shortest distance between two points, making it faster. Fibre on the other hand has to go underground and around obstacles. So far so good. There are, however, physical limitations. As microwave operates point-to-point, the signal can be interrupted by an obstruction. Mountainous or hilly areas, of which Europe has plenty, are immediately ruled out. In addition, there are a finite number of microwave towers across Europe and a finite number of dishes that can fit on to a tower. Once a tower is “full” there is no room for additional capacity. Inevitably, this will mean a race among providers to gain access to these towers and that microwave services will be restricted to the early adopters in the FS community.

Availability of bandwidth

Whereas with fibre you can just keep adding capacity, with microwave you are limited by the availability of bandwidth. The volume of market data being pumped out by exchanges exceeds the microwave bandwidth available, which means trading desks need to determine the best way to exploit microwave in conjunction with fibre. Some firms may, for instance, opt to send market data via microwave for their most profitable financial instruments, and use fibre for everything else.

Market demand

While there are limitations, the shortfalls are not dampening the appetite for microwave. Much of the interest in our own microwave route, between Basildon and Frankfurt, has been driven by the fact that even the smallest of price movements can be the difference between profit and loss. So much so that we are already investigating other European routes and conducting detailed feasibility studies on other routes within the UK.

Traders have always looked for new ways to trade more quickly. While microwave represents the latest technology to be employed in the race to zero, adopting microwave services will not deliver new areas of business for trading houses, but it will deliver a significant competitive advantage. What is important to consider is how and where the technology is used to best competitive advantage, complementing existing ultra- low latency fibre-based services to exploit pricing differentials.