Megaport expands the reach and capabilities of its virtual cloud router

Megaport has expanded the footprint of its flagship virtual routing platform, Megaport Cloud Router (MCR), and added new capabilities.

The MCP platform delivers on-demand private connectivity across Layer 3 from 19 key metro routing zones throughout the world in order to offer direct connectivity to more than 130 cloud on-ramps globally.

"Megaport's mission is to reduce the complexity of getting connected in a cloud-enabled world," said Megaport CEO Vincent English, in a statement. "MCR allows our customers to take advantage of powerful networking capabilities without having to be an expert network engineer. Organizations can spin up virtual routers on demand to connect faster while saving on resources and costs, all while controlling traffic in the cloud. This truly makes building network connections an intuitive, as-a-service experience."

Virtual routing replaces dedicated enterprise hardware, which lowers the cost and improves performance by making direct connections to cloud providers. Megaport also said that using MCR doesn't require extensive experience or knowledge in networking

MCR comes with four speed tiers that are capable of reaching up to 10 Gbps routing throughput. It also has Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that allows for fast link failure detection supporting fast failover of routed traffic, and BGP Multi Exit Discriminator (MED) to support Virtual Cross Connect (VXC) prioritization that tells autonomous systems the preferred route to take for performance tuning.

MCR also features Google API optimization to speed up MCR connections to the Google Cloud Platform while eliminating the need to click between Google and Megaport screens to establish a service.

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MCR use cases include hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and multi-region access and cloud-to-cloud connectivity. MCR works with cloud service providers— including Alibaba, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, and SAP —without the need for physical infrastructure.

"Our goal with the expansion of MCR was to make it as simple as possible for customers to utilize their service providers of choice," said Megaport's John Veizades, vice president of engineering and product in a statement. "We're integrating MCR with leading cloud providers to remove barriers to adopting cloud services and enable ease-of-use for inter-cloud connectivity. Our customers can provision point-and-click cloud-to-cloud connections as they build their multi-cloud architectures."

By combining its software-defined network (SDN) with MCR's virtualized routing capability, Megaport provides connections between key routing zones across North America, Asia, and Europe. By partnering with 92 data center operators globally, Megaport can offer provider-agnostic solutions in key markets

MCR is available in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Perth), Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), USA (Ashburn, VA; San Jose, CA; Atlanta; Dallas; Chicago; New York; Las Vegas and Canada – Montreal), and Europe (London, Dublin, Frankfurt and Stockholm).

Megaport was founded in Australia in 2013 with the goal of connecting its customers to cloud service providers, which then led it to build a physical network that it could overlay its software platform on. Megaport then struck deals with cloud service providers that allowed its customers to connect to multiple clouds.