GCP releases private network direct connectivity option
Fri 8 Sep 2017
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has released Dedicated Interconnect, a service allowing users to establish a private network connection directly to GCP through a Dedicated Interconnect location.
The move comes out of a desire on Google’s part to help provide large businesses with ‘easy to manage, high bandwidth, private, network connectivity.’ According to Google, the product can potentially cut network costs and offers increased throughput.
The product is being marketed particularly towards companies with data and latency-sensitive services. Google uses the example of Metamarkets, a real-time analytics company, who claims that Dedicated Interconnect gave it higher reliability and throughput, with lower latency and costs.
The product allows businesses to extend the corporate data centre network and RFC 1918 IP space into Google Cloud – creating a hybrid cloud deployment.
Businesses can access the service through one of Google’s points of presence, typically found in large colocation data centres in major hubs, such as London, Frankfurt and Paris in Europe, or San Francisco and Dallas in the U.S.
Available in 10Gb/s increments, up to a maximum capacity of 80Gb/s, through eight circuits in a single interconnect, the product can be configured to offer a 99.9% or 99.99% uptime SLA, if the customer pays for extra redundant connections.
Google states that thanks to ‘point and click deployment with ongoing monitoring’, the product is easy to provision and easy to manage. Once the product is in place, an additional virtual local area network (VLAN) can be added in the same way.
The product is available from today, in a number of locations, and Google says it will be soon available in other areas as well, meaning users will be able to connect to Google’s network from ‘almost anywhere in the world.’
Other cloud providers offer a similar service, such as Azure’s ExpressRoute or AWS Direct Connect. GCP also recently made their service available to users via the public internet.
