Selling hardware into the cloud

A Cambridge start-up approached us with an interesting problem. In this age of virtualisation, they have a new and important service, but one which can’t be virtualised as it relies on trusted hardware. They know other companies will want to use their service from within their private networks within the big cloud providers, but they can’t co-locate their hardware within Amazon or Azure.

This picture is a slight over simplification of the process

The interesting thing here is that the solution is simple. It is possible to link directly into Amazon via Direct Connect and to Azure via Express Route. To use Direct Connect or Express Route within the UK you need to have a telco circuit terminating in a Telecity data centre, or to physically colocate your servers. As many of you will know, Mythic Beasts are physically present in three such data centres, the most important of which is Telecity Sovereign House, the main UK point of presence for both Amazon and Microsoft.

So our discussion here is nice and straightforward. Our future customer can co-locate their prototype service with Mythic Beasts in our Telecity site in Docklands. They can then connect to Express Route and Direct Connect over dedicated fibre within the datacentre when they’re ready to take on customers. Their customers then have to set up a VPC Peering connection and the service is ready to use. This is dedicated specialised hardware from the inside of ‘the cloud’, and it’s something we can offer to all manner of companies, start-up or not, from any dedicated or colocated service. You only need ask.