Using a data center that only lets companies use one vendor can negatively affect operations, with possible disadvantages including a lack of pricing options. A carrier-neutral facility offers more freedom in a world with ever-increasing tech demands.
Companies are currently experiencing tech-related pressures, like increasing AI workloads. Having more freedom to select a carrier ensures an organization has consistent access to the required connectivity. In addition, having a direct connection to a cloud provider, for example, can speed up system performance, improving user experience and employee productivity.
This article examines the architectural patterns, financial effects, resilience implications and sustainability considerations of carrier-neutral facilities.
What are carrier-neutral facilities?
Multiple factors are increasing pressure on IT operations. For example, AI usage increases east-west traffic, the movement of data packets that transition from server to server within a data center.
A carrier-neutral facility can help companies solve some of these challenges. It’s an environment where customers can choose from multiple telecommunications carriers and avoid being tied to a single provider, as they would be at a single-carrier site.
Carrier-neutral data centers are colocation data centers. An organization using a colocation data center rents space, utilities and physical infrastructure in a data center to host the company’s servers, storage and networking equipment.
Some carrier-neutral facilities offer direct cloud connectivity, which is a dedicated or private connection between an enterprise network and a cloud provider and can help improve performance. They also let companies be interconnected – or send information back and forth — with more than one carrier in what is called a meet-me room.
Benefits of carrier-neutral facilities
Carrier-neutral facilities offer several different advantages. They can improve app performance, as they let a company switch to another carrier if its first choice experiences an outage.
They can also reduce networking costs because companies can shop around and determine if a particular provider’s cost is right for them, which can be helpful as egress fees continue to rise.
Additionally, these facilities can simplify hybrid IT infrastructure. Enterprises can establish direct connections to multiple cloud providers, carriers, SaaS platforms and business partners from one location. Direct cloud connectivity also reduces a company’s dependence on public Internet connections.
Companies pursuing a multi-cloud approach can use a carrier-neutral facility as an aggregation point because the facility lets organizations work with more than one cloud vendor.
Building the business case
CIOs can communicate the value of using a carrier-neutral facility to the rest of the C-suite using various metrics.
CIOs should first inventory existing infrastructure, utilization and network operations effort to establish a baseline. Include data such as:
- Application latency and throughput.
- WAN utilization.
- Cloud data transfer and egress costs.
- Carrier charges.
- Number of network providers and connections.
- Outage frequency and recovery performance.
- Network operations effort.
- Critical application dependencies.
When making the business case for a carrier-neutral facility, note that it can simplify operations overall and improve latency. Some performance-related data to discuss includes latency-sensitive applications, current throughput requirements and any data-intensive workloads.
Using a carrier-neutral facility could also help the company reduce egress costs because it will have more freedom to choose a vendor. Some potential metrics to mention related to cost reduction are potential WAN optimization and carrier pricing.
Switching to a carrier-neutral facility could also improve the company’s resilience, which would benefit all aspects of operations. When discussing improved resilience, CIOs could mention improved carrier diversity, path diversity and any failover options.
CIOs can compare the full cost and risk of the company’s current architecture to use of the proposed carrier-neutral facility over a defined period. Account for all costs, including the following:
- Cross-connect and interconnection charges.
- Carrier circuits.
- Equipment and deployment.
- Migration costs.
- Operational staffing.
Potential sustainability benefits
In addition to improved network capabilities, a carrier-neutral facility could support an organization’s overall sustainability strategy.
First, its proximity and private links reduce transport energy. They may also use on-site power sources such as fuel cells and energy storage, including Battery Energy Storage Systems, which would make them more environmentally friendly.
Some sustainability metrics to examine when considering a carrier-neutral facility include the facility’s efficiency metrics and renewable energy sourcing.
Wrap up
A carrier-neutral facility can give organizations more freedom by reducing dependency on a single vendor and can result in other benefits, such as reduced latency.
CIOs should examine factors such as traffic volume and the value of redundancy to determine whether switching to a carrier-neutral facility would be a good choice for their organization. Mapping the organization’s highest-value traffic flows and their current cost, latency, provider dependencies and failure paths can provide some insight.
Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to Informa TechTarget, The New Stack and CompTIA Blogs.
