Anyone got experience with "Equinix Direct"?
Looks like an interesting product from the glossy, but rather light on
details. I'm interested in the technical specs and real-life
experience.
(Not looking for sales. I've got a purchasing d00d for that.)
Thanks,
Bought and used ED at SV1 since mid-2004 I think. I was running a consumer
website at the time. I'm no longer with the company but when I checked
last year, they were still using it as a *backup* internet provider and
it's worked out well for them. The biggest problem back then, and
currently, is the lack of larger ISPs. At SV1 they had Global Crossing,
but the rest were basically mid-sized regional or national network
providers like Hurricane Electric.
The process for using it:
1) Purchase the service
2) Get the connect to ED, hook up to your equipment
3) You will establish a BGP neighbor relationship with the ED route servers
only, regardless of how many actual network providers you configure,
4) Use a web interface to pick the providers you want,
- it'll be arranged as a matrix where you can choose commit rates (they
start at "0" for a lot of providers) and the resulting price, as well as
terms (which also start at "none").
- also depending on provider, some will do DIA (direct internet access) or
just on-net (just their, and their direct customer's networks), or both.
Make sure you know what service you're purchasing and that it matches your
design.
5) Modify or apply any routing policies you want specific for the providers
you've chosen,
6) Start pushing packets.
Though you peer with Equinix Direct and not the provider's router, of
course ED strips their ASN and you don't see it in the path attribute. You
may or may not be able to set attributes like community or MED with the
providers; I don't know because we never used them in that capacity. It
was strictly a backup circuit for us and so we set local-pref and path
prepending and left it at that.
We occasionally had problems with our primary service providers and the ED
service would work great. External monitoring (a la Gomez or Keynote)
wouldn't catch a thing and no customer (internal or external) complaints
ever bubbled up to me. During contract negotiations with our primary
provider, we ran on Global Crossing through ED for 1-2 months with no
problems.
For on-demand bandwidth with no commit and no contracts required, and if
you're already in an Equinix data center, I think it's a very nice service.
bt
Thanks for the response to my question.
What I have received confirms this is basically a metered IXP with
route servers and a mix of paid transit/peering options. Will be
interesting to see what the participant mix is.
It does concern me that the only connectivity options are FE/GE, no
10GE at this time. Makes me wonder about how serious the service is,
and whether I will end up with a more congested service than simply
getting a mix of transit providers myself.
Anyway, thanks again to all who responded.
It depends on what you mean by "serious". As I understand it, it's not
targeted at the big end of town -- there's no way you wouldn't be going
direct to the big tier 1s yourself if you needed multiple 10GE pipes, for a
wide variety of reasons. Instead, it's intended as a "leg up" for the
smaller players to get into the marketplace *without* needing to make a huge
commitment to the big tier 1s and manage far more moving parts than would
otherwise be the case.
- Matt