1. There is a strong belief and understanding that the “Cloud” is more than just the application providers who serve up content and commerce.
2. An ecosystem exists. There would be no cloud without the data centers where the information is stored and cross-connected and the networks that interconnect the data centers and allow customers to access applications or data.
3. Data centers talk about being carrier neutral and service providers, in turn, can talk about data center neutrality, but at the end-of-the-day customers want best-in-class options paired together in a solution. Especially financial services, content, and large enterprise customers who’s revenue and/or application performance depends on this “cloud  ecosystem”.
4. In a commoditized network services market, real value for cloud and data center connectivity is driven through diversity and uniqueness (such as our Xtreme Ultra Low Latency Network or our Transcom Route to between NY and Virginia).

We’re proud to be collaborating and connecting to top data center operators such as Equinix. Today, we’re connected to close to 25 Equinix data centers – the largest concentration in our portfolio of 125.

The end-goal, of course, is to provide value to mutual end-customers who want to access their applications, back-up their data, and drive their business forward — all on the back of an ecosystem proudly designed to do just that.

GLIF brings together the world’s premier R&E networking engineers to architect an international optical infrastructure.

Last week we announced the news of MetroCast’s 100 Gbps upgrade, however this isn’t our first rodeo with 100 Gbps. In the Fall of 2012, at the International Conference of High Performance Computer, Networking, Storage and Analyses (SC12) in Salt Lake City, Utah, a consortium of researchers demonstrated a national scale 100 Gbps optical network testbed – and Sidera’s network played a significant role in this achievement.

100 Gbps network deployments are not new news, but the ability to transport extremely large capacity data flows, including a 98.4 Gbps data transfer with zero packet drops over 2000 miles IS significant.  Beyond the traditional capabilities of global networks, the next generation research and discovery consortium at this event was seeking to push the limits to prove big data storage, analysis, and transfer across wide area networks is doable.

Sidera partnered with researchers, optical equipment providers (Ciena and Adva) and the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), as well as the StarLight and the Open Cloud Consortiums, as part of an initiative to investigate new networking techniques, technologies, and services for petascale science.  Specifically, the project is driving advances in 100 Gbps end-to-end data flow technology, including disk-to-disk and memory-to-memory transmissions. The testbed was established for the for the 12^th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop, sponsored by the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF).

With such key institutions and extraordinary scientific and research thought leaders seeking to advance the way they communicate, proving 100G network capabilities can underscore the importance of cloud networking for this community. Sidera is no stranger to the cloud. Our mantra, ‘the cloud doesn’t work without the network’, highlights our network capabilities to deliver ultra-low latency, high-performance connectivity to hundreds of data centers and thousands of organizations throughout our footprint. The underlying importance of this news is that the research and discovery community is trying to prove that research organizations and data centers in widely disparate geographic locations can be connected through high-performance networks to efficiently enable research, discovery, and education applications when dealing with Big Data and Petascale Science.

Secondarily, Sidera is working with this community to explore how high-performance networks can help the R&E community take advantage of remote data centers that provide immense space and power at low costs per megawatt. The trick is to ensure  users, no matter where they are located, can efficiently access and utilize this data at any time. This might reduce operational expenses by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For the research, discovery, and education space, this is what connectivity to the cloud means and this is Sidera’s network – adept at delivering high-bandwidth capabilities to provide organizations the opportunity to afford and utilize the storage and compute infrastructure they need to advance our understanding of the universe around us.

Sidera has activated our Emergency Response Procedures in reaction to the winter storm that will be affecting our service area in the Northeast tomorrow and into the weekend. The following steps are being taken to ensure all resources are in place to implement our business continuity plans:

• Sidera has started holding regular event status calls and will continue to do so starting tomorrow and through the weekend with the Network Operations Center and the Sidera Management team.
• The NOC is reviewing all applicable government agency websites and media outlets for up to the minute storm updates.
• The NOC will be staffed with additional personnel.
• Regional Field Operations personnel are adding supplemental “on-call” responsibilities.
• All generators have been checked and fueled.
• Sidera emergency restoration vendors are available and on standby.
• Our Long Island team is prepared to respond to any outages.
• Depending on the severity of the storm, we may suspend dispatch of personnel for safety reasons.

Sidera understands that your communications, commerce, and content rely on our infrastructure. We are proud to have earned your business and trust and we take potential threats to your service very seriously. Should outages occur, you can be assured that we will do our best to isolate, react, and respond to issues quickly.

Please click here to access our escalation procedures. You can refer to this should an outage occur. Our hope is that this storm does not affect our network or your service, but if it does, we are committed to rapidly resolving any issues.

Best Regards,

Clint Heiden
President, Sidera Networks

The Chicago market is a central location between the US coasts and as such, also is important for Content, Cloud Services, and Media verticals. In 2013, look for Sidera to make some noise about how our high-performance network will grow to serve these fast growing verticals.

Statistics often speak for themselves so let’s reference a Cloud Infographic created by EMC Corporation utilizing data from IDC Research, which I came across on Cloudtweaks.com.  Between 2010 and 2012, the digital universe grew from 1,227 exabytes (billions of gigabytes) to 2,837 Exabytes. Fast forward to 2020 and the anticipated increase is predicted to reach 40,026 Exabytes.

Of those 40,026 Exabytes, 37% will be “touched” by The Cloud, meaning they will be processed in or transmitted through private or public cloud. The predicted growth of the digital universe and, ultimately, the requirement to move all that data around will put an even greater demand on high-performance fiber-based networks. Bandwidth elasticity, availability, and network uptime are crucial to the future of moving, processing and using all of this data. Let’s not forget a low latency network if you want to retrieve your data this century.

1. Together, we extend the reach, density, and scale of our network for customers. Our network will cover 20,000 fiber route miles across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, with key connections to points internationally such as Toronto and London.
2. Together, we will provide access to over 6,000 on-net service locations that include commercial buildings, data centers, financial exchanges, content hubs, and other critical interconnection facilities.
3. Together, we can better serve fast growing markets such as cloud services, content, media, financial services and more and their intensifying needs for high-performance bandwidth solutions.
4. Together, the cumulative expertise of our dedicated employees and our intense focus on customer-service and satisfaction will set us apart in the industry.

Sidera and Lightower believe that this merger will deliver tangible benefits to our customer base. We’re excited about the future and look forward to what it will bring for our employees and our customers. Stay tuned…

Click here to read the press release.
Click here to access Frequently Asked Questions about the merger.

Blum’s book reminded me of all of the foundational work that’s occurred over the past 20 years to enable the cool applications and services that we take for granted.  iTunes, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Amazon, foursquare, Facebook, eBay, Zynga, Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix all need reliable network infrastructure to allow their customers to reach the content that they crave.  Those “tubes” are still the central nervous system of the Internet and make it possible to communicate, share information and buy goods, globally.

I recommend the book. It is an excellent, fast read that reinforces Sidera’s belief that “The Cloud Doesn’t Work Without the Network.” It also serves as a historical resource to share with folks outside of the industry (like my family) who want to better understand how the Internet works, but don’t have interest in delving too deeply into the technology.

This year’s gift buying is easy.  Happy Holidays!!

Enterprises can take advantage of cloud-based disaster recovery services to ensure business continuity, but only if the underlying network is both high-performance and diverse. It’s the combination of these continuity services AND a highly diverse network that can come to the rescue, whether it’s a natural disaster, security breach, or any other interruption to business operations.

The evolution of technology and bandwidth has eroded this conversation making voice on data networks the norm and Time Division, well, the exception. Real time communications have enhanced voice quality while MOS scores have improved to enable voice and data to live happily together.

The conversation kicked off with a look at what’s new for Sidera in the Ethernet space, but it quickly moved to cover a number of important enterprise networking topics such as SDN.

Calafati said he is very encouraged with the soaring demand for this Ethernet connectivity. His statement that “the decimal has moved” indicates that a greater number of businesses are looking to 10GB and 100GB connections, which in turn has pushed Sidera to implement 1 Tbit/s switching in its own backbone.

The upshot of this high bandwidth Ethernet push from the customer side has been updates to Sidera’s infrastructure aligning the company better with widely accepted network standards, rather than simply latching on to one specific technology or implementation.

Watch the video to learn more from Glenn on these topics.