As businesses evolve towards hybrid and distributed IT architectures, the need to leverage multiple data centres (multi-DC) has become a strategic necessity. Modern workloads demand flexibility, resilience and proximity, not just to customers, but to the ecosystems they interact with daily.
The challenge
1. Choosing the right facility for the right workload
Organisations increasingly require a fit-for-purpose approach when deploying workloads. In an era where colocation and cloud providers are available in abundance, organisations are the main beneficiaries to pick and choose the most relevant location to their business needs. Each ecosystems presents unique value propositions:
- Power-intensive environments can be hosted in data centres that offer more competitive power rates and energy efficiency, driving down operational costs.
- Workloads requiring low-latency connections to third-party vendors or service providers can be positioned in facilities offering closer physical and network proximity. Some colocation providers are well connected to local peering and local ecosystems, while others provide options to international providers and clients.
- Colocations and their partners that offer flexibility to expand with minimum friction and low risk (cloud hyperscale approach) by offering per-U base hosting as opposed to full racks, or leverage compute and storage as a service, rather than investing in costly physical hardware.
2. Extending networking and security landing zones to multiple data centres
But choosing the best match for all workloads provides unique challenges due to legacy applications requiring specific hypervisors, bespoke workloads and even contractual obligations with incumbent providers, which limits choice. Organisations requires the flexibility and freedom that allows IT teams to match each workload to the environment that makes the most economic and operational sense during the project's life cycle. Clients require both choice as well as flexibility to expand to a multi-colo, multicloud or hybrid cloud solutions.
While multi-DC strategies offer clear benefits, they also introduce complexity in networking, capital expenditure and security. Establishing seamless interconnectivity between facilities typically requires investments in racks, expensive layer two extensions, multiple security investments and careful orchestration of policies and traffic.
The Intelys approach: Bring your own server, we’ll do the rest
Intelys’ Secure Network Aggregation Point (SNAP) platform simplifies multi-DC deployments. Customers can bring their own servers or applications into any supported environment (such as Teraco and Equinix), while Intelys provides the secure networking, flexible hosting and interconnectivity layer that binds everything together.
This approach enables businesses to deploy workloads in the most suitable data centre for each use case, without worrying about connectivity constraints or duplicated infrastructure. SNAP also makes it possible to extend existing environments into new facilities with minimal capex and configuration effort.
“What we’re seeing is a shift from a one-size-fits-all model to a workload-first mindset,” says Kris Alberts, Solutions Architect at Intelys. “SNAP allows our customers to design their infrastructure around what makes sense for performance, cost and proximity – without being tied down by the complexity of traditional data centre networking.”
The result
- Seamless extension between legacy and modern data centres.
- Unified security and networking control plane.
- Reduced infrastructure duplication and capex.
- Enhanced workload agility, performance and resilience.
- Optimised placement of workloads based on cost, performance and proximity.
With SNAP, Intelys transforms the complexity of multi-DC networking into a scalable, managed service, helping organisations focus on business outcomes while Intelys takes care of the network foundation
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