Microsoft Azure
– Sebastian Moss/DatacenterDynamics

Internet exchange operator DE-CIX secured a major hyperscale win this week as it boosted private connectivity for Microsoft Azure across cities in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Azure ExpressRoute Metro solutions were employed in Exchanges in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Singapore. These provide dual-homed connections to two distinct locations within the same city.

DE-CIX already offers a total of 29 on-ramps to Azure across some 24 cities, with the operator detailed more locations were set to follow. The operator billed its latest expansion as a means to enable higher availability for sensitive AI workloads and critical resources.

“Connecting directly to Azure ExpressRoute Metro on the DE-CIX platform provides a low-latency path to the Microsoft network. The ExpressRoute Metro architecture ensures redundant and resilient connectivity to support critical workloads,” Sudha Mahajan, partner for Azure Cloud and AI at Microsoft, noted in a statement.

Azure ExpressRoute Metro provide private, dedicated connections between enterprise infrastructure and Azure environments. Users can set up dual-homed links – were two or more distinct network paths are connected to provide redundancy – allowing for more resilient and stable connectivity within the same metropolitan area.

DE-CIX said it maintains a total of “close to a terabit of bandwidth to major hyperscalers,” boasting dedicated private access to Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azure.

“DE-CIX’s distributed, carrier, and data center neutral exchanges enable local and remote access to all the major cloud players,” Christoph Dietzel, head of products and research at DE-CIX, noted. “This secures critical enterprise processes and workloads and allows companies to build the most robust cloud connectivity architecture – integrating a multicloud approach and including remote cloud regions for back-up and resiliency purposes.”