Businesses must be able to scale their connectivity on demand to meet precise bandwidth requirements for running various types of workloads. AI modeling, massive data ingestion, autonomous driving (AD) testing, and other modern use cases are driving up demand for higher connection bandwidth to ingest, filter and analyze massive volumes of data—whether on-premises or in the cloud. Without adequate bandwidth, uploading and filtering data can take weeks or months before companies can begin to analyze it for critical insights.
Starting today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Direct Connect 25 Gbps hosted connections are available to customers for private connectivity between AWS and their data centers, branch offices and digital infrastructure. Three years ago, we announced the availability of dedicated AWS Direct Connect 100 Gbps connections on Platform Equinix®. While this met the need for certain use cases, there’s growing demand for additional bandwidth levels that are greater than 10 Gbps hosted connections but lower than 100 Gbps dedicated connections. This new offering will accelerate establishing high speed and secure connections, while removing the complexity of managing multiple connections.
Our software-defined virtual connectivity makes accessing 25G bandwidth easy and cost-efficient. Customers can use their existing Equinix Fabric®/AWS integration to quickly set up these connections within minutes at 23 Equinix IBX® colocation data centers offering AWS on-ramps globally. They can also use Equinix Fabric Cloud Router—our on-demand multicloud virtual routing service that’s included as a built-in component of Equinix Fabric—for direct, secure, performant connectivity between public clouds without the need to deploy or manage your own physical routing hardware. AWS customers can set up Equinix Fabric, including Fabric Cloud Router, without a physical port at an Equinix IBX data center if they simply need cloud-to-cloud connectivity.
High-bandwidth connections on AWS Direct Connect can solve use cases in transformational ways for businesses in several industries.
5 use cases benefit from 25 Gbps bandwidth
1. Improve hybrid and multi-cloud enterprise workload and data migration performance
Running enterprise workloads and applications across a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture as well as migrating or transferring data between on-premises and cloud often require high bandwidth and high speed, secure connectivity. Using 25 Gbps AWS Direct Connect hosted connections in combination with Equinix Fabric delivers high-capacity connectivity to AWS services enterprises that increases performance.
2. Leverage high bandwidth for low latency in high-frequency trading
Extracting, processing and forwarding high volumes of the most current financial market data quickly and efficiently is crucial in the hyper-competitive, high-frequency trading market. Traders rely on real-time insights for confidence to place orders at the best possible price points, making proximity to financial markets and real-time data essential. Accessing 25 Gbps AWS Direct Connect hosted connections on Platform Equinix provides the reliable and secure high-bandwidth connectivity required by leading high-frequency trading companies.
3. Expand AI model training
Data migrations are becoming commonplace as businesses move large datasets between clouds for AI training and inference. For example, customers move data from an application in one cloud to do model training in another cloud. Or you could jumpstart your AI initiatives by taking advantage of existing AI models instead of building your own AI models from scratch.
Storing data near the cloud is also a compelling option for flexibility and a more predictable storage cost model. Businesses use cloud adjacent storage at Equinix to store data in their colocated infrastructure or Equinix Metal®, our dedicated bare metal solution, and move it to clouds on demand.
4. Accelerate Autonomous Driving (AD) testing
Autonomous driving development and testing involves ingesting and migrating high volumes of data at scale from the field directly to the cloud for analysis and processing. This capability is required to support advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving solutions. Each day of data collection can generate up to 50 TB of data per vehicle that needs to be uploaded to the cloud. If a company only has an internet connection of 1 Gbps, uploading all that data could take months. With the Equinix/AWS data ingest solution that leverages AWS 25 Gbps Direct Connect hosted connections, the upload time shrinks to hours.
5. Streamline online gaming development and player experience
When gaming companies make software coding changes to games ranging in size from 100-200 GB, they must republish the updated versions to their production servers as fast as possible. With 25 Gbps connectivity on AWS Direct Connect at Equinix, gaming companies get high-bandwidth, multicloud connectivity that’s reliable and secure for running and uploading their studio development workloads while bypassing the public internet.
More reasons to deploy AWS Direct Connect at Equinix
Leveraging hosted AWS Direct Connect with Equinix Fabric offers the following benefits:
- Enhanced performance: Improve overall network performance with private, secure, low-latency, and high-throughput connections between your IT infrastructure and AWS that bypass the public internet.
- Secure and resilient data transfers: Protect data transmissions with enhanced resilience against network failures with a robust, secure and scalable infrastructure that delivers efficient and reliable services.
- Scalability and flexibility: Scale up bandwidth on demand to handle traffic growth with ease.
- Global accessibility: Enable low latency, high availability and resiliency in strategic markets; AWS Direct Connect is available in 49 Equinix locations worldwide (23 of which now support 25 Gbps hosted connections).
Businesses can strengthen their operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness with secure, reliable, and high-performance connections to AWS by using the combination of hosted AWS Direct Connect and Equinix Fabric.
To get started with 25 Gbps bandwidth on AWS Direct Connect hosted connections at Equinix, contact us today or view the product documentation for availability details.
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