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BT tapped Digital Realty to help expand its Global Fabric into high-density locations
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Data sovereignty is becoming an increasingly important issue for enterprise customers
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BT didn't rule out potential Global Fabric partnerships with hyperscalers in the future
Digital Reality’s carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) are now a part of U.K. operator BT’s Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform.
According to Simon Walker, head of cloud networking solutions at BT, Digital Realty is an important partner for Global Fabric because it owns a large number of CNFs and carrier hotels, which are central co-location hubs in dense urban areas. “Digital Realty has strength in high-density locations,” Walker said.
Digital Realty operates more than 300 CNFs in more than 25 countries and over 50 metro areas.
BT unveiled Global Fabric in October as a way for companies to manage their multiple clouds and applications and better protect their data. Global Fabric connects different CNFs and acts as a separate network that customers can use to route their workloads.
The goal, according to Walker, is to offer customers a lot of flexibility with their workloads, and have locations in close proximity to them so that data can be stored and moved around in a more secure way.
Data security and sovereignty are becoming more important as governments are starting to enact rules for how digital data is generated, processed and stored, making it imperative that companies know how to track data that is being moved in and out of the country.
Because of this, many companies are looking for closed loop feedback for their data to make sure that it isn’t transported through certain countries.
Colin Bannon, CTO of Business at BT, said that while some businesses such as banks have had to carefully manage their data in the past, it has been expensive and difficult to accomplish. However, Global Fabric’s NaaS structure makes it possible to simplify this.
“There are some fundamentally game-changing ways to re-engineer what the internet will look like,” he said.
More data center partners
But Digital Realty isn’t BT’s only data center partner. Bannon said it’s important to have multiple partners because one partner cannot provide all the necessary connections that BT needs to build out its Global Fabric. Because of this, the company is also connected with Equinix’s data centers and plans to ink deals with smaller regional data center firms as well.
“No one provider has all the clouds in all the locations,” Bannon said.
Plus, Bannon said that having multiple data center partners provides BT with diversity and redundancy so that if there’s a failure in one cloud zone, the customer doesn’t necessarily have to send its workloads to another cloud zone and face hundreds of milliseconds of delays. “What we are offering is the ability to have diversity within the zones,” Bannon said.
He added that having this type of redundancy is becoming more critical, particularly as customers are creating more artificial intelligence (AI) workloads that can consume lots of kilowatts of power in dense footprints.
Hyperscaler pairings
Bannon said that there will be more Global Fabric partnerships in the future, and hinted that deals with hyperscalers are in the works.
"We are a digitalized telco with cloud-like economics,” he said. Bannon noted that this transformation makes it possible for BT to offer services that hyperscalers aren’t interested in providing but that their customers want, such as managed services. “We have collective customers that we need to solve problems for,” he said.