Hey there
I have been putting my thoughts on Infrapedia blog and sharing with folks like
https://www.infrapedia.com/post/top20cities-datacenters
I am working on a new article and this time my topic will be looking at cable landing stations(cls). Do you consider cable landing stations as a datacenter? Do you have any experience deploying a pop in CLS? Are you able to share (on or off record) your experience which I can refer as your experience (good or bad) why deploying a pop inside a CLS is good or bad idea. Any additional comments…
I am not a big fan of CLS deployments. They have limited networks ( like only carriers and no eyeballs) and very expensive connectivity (usually)
Thank you in advance sharing your experience
Mehmet
Sometimes there isn't a choice, i.e. islands or other constrained geographies. But I am not a fan of combining cable landing stations and datacenters/internet exchange points either.
I always want my IXPs and data centers to be connected to multiple cable systems, again maybe constrained by geographic concerns. I've also found the construction requirements of landing stations and data centers to be different. You almost always end up compromising one or the other when you combine them.
Nevertheless, there are some countries and islands with only one landing station, and not enough domestic eyeballs to support major infrastructure deployment. It might be better than nothing in those cases, but I would always prefer something else. None of those places would be in my top 20 list for deploying anything. Maybe if I needed to reach 120+ countries.
I can’t find a single cls that is a good peering spot
Latam has level3 cls in chile which is good location and has lots of networks ixp. That is like only one I am aware, doing business is quite horrible there.
Everything is over priced, slow burocraric.
Correct. The optimum location for peering is at the center of population density and the center of economic transaction density, since that minimizes average cable lengths to users. I’ve never observed a cable landing site in the downtown core of a metro area.
-Bill
I think AMS-IX had an exchange in Mombasa in the SEACOM landing station at some point, but that is gone now. I’m not sure about the exact reasons there but someone here probably knows what happened.
There’s also a big amount of carriers in the TATA landing station in Mumbai, it is the second-largest in that market just behind GPX in terms of carrier density at least according to PeeringDB.
Best regards,
Martijn
PPC-1 built by PIPE Networks, an Australian IX, fiber and carrier neutral colo provider, uses a CLS in Cromer NSW (“Sydney”) that is also a PIPE data center.
Unfortunately PIPE got acquired by TPG and their IX platform is limping along on life support these days.
you may want to have a look at the presentation from Tan Tze Meng (MDEC)
at last weeks Peering Asia 3.0 on "Malaysia: A New Submarine Cable
Route" [0] where he shared ideas how to deal with CLS and DC.
Cheers
Arnold
[0] https://www.peeringasia.com/agenda/, will be online in a couple of days
Some Caribbean islands had IXs in landing stations early on IIRC. Usually before the island built it’s first datacenter.
Some of them were better/faster about moving to the datacenter once it was established than others.
Owen
I would think that just a few extra fractions of a second from the cable station to a DC/IX are better than a DC/IX near the beach where water can wipe it all out. Preferably DC/IX should be on the 2nd or third floor IMHO on some islands.
Fresh water might not be in your scope for the article, but I believe crosslakefibre.ca operates a link across Lake Ontario, Buffalo to Toronto at TORIX 151 Front Street, but you’d need to verify with them if indeed the landing comes directly into the facility, this may be the case though as lake water is used for cooling within the facility providing conduits already in place.
Can’t wait to read the article!
Regards,
Andrew Paolucci
Crosslake does not use the Enwave cooling pipes to enter 151 Front.
Torix is at 151 Front, but 151 Front is not Torix.
My mistake, I was also wrong about the landing site location being there, I located the site using city permitting information It’s 6KM away at a local beach(woodbine).
Regards,
Andrew Paolucci
I was neither defending, nor advocating the placement, merely attempting to document some of the history.
Owen
Owen of course. I was just expressing my humble opinion to the thread. Cheers.
usually the logistics and business models of traditional CLS and DC are different (Bill Woodcock laid it out).
a few years ago i built a model for SWIFT that provided for dynamic remapping of lambda in the event of backhoe fade. Not exactly your DC, neutral IX form factor, but met the need at the time. I can dig up the DoT presentation if there is interest.
/Wm
A landing station is not typically carrier neutral and is not designed to have a huge of excess space to accommodate third parties. When I was at Hibernia Atlantic we would get from time to time a disaster recovery client, but there was not a lot of excess space available and so it was priced accordingly. It will be a very poor choice for most potential clients.
Regards,
Roderick.
As a submarine operator that "sometimes" sells co-lo space, in most
cases, it would be because of a lack of choice.
Every time a proper, carrier-neutral data centre has sprung up near the
CLS, it becomes the natural place to deploy.
Take Mombasa, for example. For a long time, the only co-lo facilities
were CLS's. A new, carrier-neutral facility popped up, and we are
encouraging all of our customers to either go there (new) or spill into
there (if they want to expand).
As a submarine cable operator, it's no fun running a CLS like a data
centre. AC power, for example, is not generally standard. Space is
limited. Access controls are different from normal data centre
procedures. Manning by technical staff may not always be 24/7. I could
go on.
But, if you have no choice, and the CLS isn't trying to milk you for all
your worth, then by all means.
Mark.
Agreed. In some of our markets where carrier-neutral facilities do not exist next to our CLS’s, we may still sell some space, until it runs out. We wouldn’t typically add anymore because, well, that’s not our core business. Where carrier-neutral data centres may exist, we encourage customers to got there, even if they feel being at the CLS is better than being at the data centre. Not a major drama since our Metro would hit the data centre anyway. Otherwise, we’re always encouraging data centre operators to build facilities in our markets to take the obvious pent-up load. Mark.
Massively different.
For example, it's not uncommon for CLS's to be built (or expanded)
purely from load containers.
Mark.
I think AMS-IX had an exchange in Mombasa in the SEACOM landing
station at some point, but that is gone now. I'm not sure about the
exact reasons there but someone here probably knows what happened.
Someone here definitely knows what happened :-\.
There's also a big amount of carriers in the TATA landing station in
Mumbai, it is the second-largest in that market just behind GPX in
terms of carrier density at least according to PeeringDB.
We know that one all too well :-).
Mark.