Chris Thorpe (Leading Edge Data Centres)
Data centre network provider Leading Edge Data Centres has struck a deal with network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider Megaport to provide direct connectivity from its upcoming Newcastle data centre.
Due to open in two weeks, the Newcastle data centre is set to utilise Megaport’s software-defined network to combine private cloud requirements with a direct on-ramp service to public clouds, offering its services on a pay-as-you-go basis.
According to Leading Edge, the partnership will mean its Newcastle customers will have direct private access to 215 cloud on-ramps and over 700 on-net locations, with elastic connectivity and the bypassing of public internet.
Chris Thorpe, CEO of Leading Edge, said the added capability through the partnership would be a “huge benefit” for the data centre network provider's customers throughout regional Australia.
“Leading Edge Data Centres chose to partner with Megaport to provide our customers choice when they connect to the cloud,” he said.
“Megaport provides options around on-demand, multicould connectivity with access to the broadest set of cloud on-ramps globally.”
Joshua Munro, acting chief commercial officer at Megaport, added that the Newcastle area, in NSW, was one of the NaaS provider’s fastest-growing regions.
“We are very pleased to be welcoming Leading Edge Data Centres to our growing ecosystem of data centre partners,” he said.
Customers at the Newcastle data centre will also be able to use Megaport’s services through the NaaS provider’s portal, as well as enable hybrid cloud, multicloud and cloud-to-cloud architectures through its Megaport Cloud Router solution.
The data centre network provider also claimed that, as a result of the deal, application localisation and traffic termination will be able to be done so “closer to the edge”.
Additionally, access will be made available to a global ecosystem of over 350 service providers, some of which include AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, Rackspace and SAP.
The partnership with Megaport is the latest for the data centre network provider, with it entering into a wholesale broadband agreement with NBN Co for facilities access service last week, which held a heavy emphasis on regional connectivity.
That emphasis has been core to Leading Edge since from at least May last year when it announced a roll out of Tier III edge data centres in regional areas. It then inked a deal in December with networking vendor Cisco to provide the infrastructure for the roll out.
According to a Leading Edge spokesperson, the deal with Megaport is specifically for the Newcastle data centre at this stage, as opposed to the rest of the roll out.
