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By Jason Schafer, Tier1 Research

T1R recently covered Horizon Data Center Solutions' filling of its first facility in Dallas and its additional expansion plans. While it is expanding its facility footprint, Horizon is also concentrating efforts on expanding its network offering at its sites, understanding the importance of carrier density and diversity for customers.

AboveNet has completed a private ring connecting Horizon's two Dallas datacenters. AboveNet's presence, and the addition of more carriers in general, has benefits all around in the way of route diversity, redundancy and scalable gigabit-level bandwidth for Horizon and its customers.

It is no longer acceptable to most datacenter tenants to be offered one or two carrier networks – carrier density is of utmost importance, which is largely why datacenters aren't found in remote locations where land and/or power are abundant or cheap. What's the minimum in terms of an acceptable number of available carriers? This is largely dependent on the type of customer and geographical location, but we put the average at around five.

The presence of AboveNet in Horizon's datacenters is another feather in the cap of both companies, and there is sure to be synergy. Abundant networks in Horizon's datacenters will make its services more appealing to customers, and more customers will drive bandwidth usage for the carriers that are present. More competition between carriers generally tends to drive network costs down, though the cost for interconnects can offset the cost from carriers.

T1R thinks that datacenter providers need to provide network density and availability at their facilities in addition to geographical location, power availability and infrastructure availability/redundancy level. As SaaS, cloud and wide area virtualization deployments become more mainstream, the network side of the datacenter bubbles closer to the top. Just knowing how many carriers are available in a facility is a start (very few providers publicly share this information on their websites), but datacenter providers should also name the carriers. Finally, the type of connectivity must be specified – is there dark fiber in the facility, is there optical transmission gear, is there an IP point-of-presence? These are increasingly important data points for customers at the start of RPF processes, rather than their conclusions.

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