Lumen Technologies continued its edge expansion, rolling out a virtual machine (VM) option that allows customer to scale their compute, storage, and networking resources based on need. The move builds on the fiber provider’s recent European expansion.

Lumen’s Edge VM is a software platform that runs on shared, multi-tenant servers hosted in Lumen edge facilities. The infrastructure and network services are fully managed by Lumen.

Customers can use Lumen’s Edge Orchestrator alongside public cloud services from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to create VMs to serve their workload needs.

Jeff Sieracki, senior director of product management at Lumen, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the VM offer is for “customers that don't want to deal with bare metal or if they have different server size or compute size requirements.”

“They can leverage virtual machines in the same fashion they do in bare metal,” Sieracki said. “They can go into our portal and spin up, pick their location, and spin up their compute type, so it adds greater flexibility and it actually fits a lot of use cases that we've been having customers and potential customers wait on because they're looking for a virtualized environment that is easier for them to deal with.”

Sieracki noted that one of those use cases was supporting real-time collaboration for latency sensitive workloads, offering up the music industry as an example.

“You have performers that are in disparate locations, but they're all performing together through a studio trying to cut a track,” Sieracki said. “There's companies out there that need to be able to bring that all together and have low latency.”

He also said that gaming companies could tap into the system to support faster connectivity when needed.

The VM option does have an overhead hit, but Sieracki said “it’s minimal,” noting most of the latency impact is driven by the distance from where an application lives and the network.

“That’s really with our footprint what has been eliminated, and since it sits on our backbone, the public IP backbone, you're sitting right there so you're gonna have, most likely, better traffic flow sitting on our edge compute versus having to hop from multiple internet networks to get to one of the larger networks,” Sieracki said. “Plus we have very deep IP peering so if we have to hop networks it's going to be as efficient as possible.”

Sieracki said the vendor already has interoperability between bare metal and its storage platform and is looking to add network attached storage over the coming months. It’s also looking to add support for commercial operating systems and dynamic networking management.

“Once that's complete then you'll be able to spin up a workload on either bare metal or virtual machines in the Lumen Edge, and then if you have a public cloud environment you can leverage our dynamic network to connect it to,” Sieracki said.

Lumen is then looking to add containerized support for further customization at some point next year.

The VM launch comes on the heels of Lumen expanding its edge network reach into Europe. That move tapped into its fiber backbone to support growing enterprise need for low-latency support on bare metal and in manufacturing locations. The initial launch was around Lumen’s bare metal-as-a-service offering, which includes access to four Lumen services based around on-premises support.

To support the expansion, Lumen deployed an additional 100-gigabit MPLS and IP network connectivity and increased power and cooling capabilities at some of its edge data center locations to deal with the increased workload. The vendor’s European footprint consists of approximately 42,000 route miles of fiber connecting to more than 2,500 on-net buildings and 540 public and private third-party data centers.

Worldwide, Lumen manages and operates approximately 500,000 global route miles of fiber and more than 190,000 on-net buildings. These connect to 2,200 public and private third-party data centers and public cloud service providers.