SSE launches LIGHTNOW

SSE Telecoms is launching LIGHTNOW – a new high-capacity, ultra-resilient optical networking service providing 10Gigabit wavelength connectivity between 21 of the busiest data centres in the London area. This forms the second stage of a major expansion of SSE Telecoms’ UK national network, dubbed Project Edge.

The new LIGHTNOW service will provide organisations with rapidly provisioned (one week) 10Gb optical wavelengths in between commercial data centres, with sub 1ms latency. LIGHTNOW offers customers flexible contract durations starting at three months, a zero set-up charge option, in-life circuit moves between any of the on-net data centres and 24/7 support, all at extremely competitive rates.

“As the London commercial data centre estates have matured, each operator has established its own market position, with some specialising as communications hubs, some offering basic value services and some targeting financial exchanges, while others feature very high levels of availability and service,” said Chris Jagusz, managing director of SSE Telecoms. “Smart data centre customers – we call them Pro-locaters – have made the most of these options, distributing their IT estates between data centres in order to match application to location. For example, while business critical servers find a natural home in Tier 3 and 4 data centres, backup and archive platforms can be more economically placed in ‘best value’ sites. This distribution of assets is simply not possible without readily available, very high quality and extremely high bandwidth connectivity between sites; this is exactly what we’re introducing with LIGHTNOW.”

SSE Telecoms specialises in delivering ultra-high capacity connectivity services to organisations that simply have no tolerance to risk of downtime. Its diverse customer base includes Thomson Reuters, E.ON and Janet – a Government funded organisation providing services to research and education centres in the UK. The new LIGHTNOW service is a key component of Project Edge, which will see SSE Telecoms expand its network to 13,700 kilometres, reaching 200,000 central business district postcodes to securely and reliably deliver services that are hosted in data centres to customers and users nationwide.

Jagusz continued, “LIGHTNOW is our latest initiative to bring ultra-resilient network solutions to a greater number of data centre users. This customer-centric service is designed for organisations that really care about the integrity of their connectivity services and whose reputations and financial performance could be seriously affected by any unexpected downtime.

“Pro-location is a key trend in the London data centre market,” said Matthew Dent, CEO of Volta Data Centres – one of the first of London’s prime data centre properties to be connected to the LIGHTNOW network. “We see inter-data centre connectivity with this kind of technical, operational and commercial flexibility as a fundamental enabler for our demanding Government and Enterprise co-location customers. No single data centre can provide all of the features and services required by today’s savvy enterprise IT managers. Inter-site connectivity of LIGHTNOW’s quality is essential.”

LIGHTNOW is powered by Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with WaveLogic coherent optics. The service leverages the 6500’s ROADM bridge features, which ensure full agility for the provisioning and routing of wavelengths, underpinning the “wavelength in a week” service pledge.

“As enterprises continue their adoption of cloud services they require more bandwidth at more data centre locations, higher performance, faster service turn-up, and on-demand connectivity,” said Nick Walden, managing director, EMEA regional carriers at Ciena. “Our OPn architecture gives operators like SSE Telecoms the ability to respond competitively and quickly to these rapidly developing customer requirements for high bandwidth optical connectivity.”

The London data centres connected by SSE Telecoms are as follows: Volta (London City), Digital Realty Trust (Woking), Equinix LD5 (Slough), Global Switch 2 (Docklands), Infinity SDC (Slough), Interxion (London City), Level 3 (London City) , Optimum [previously Sentrum] (Hayes), Savvis (Slough), SunGard Availability Services (Hounslow), Telecity Hex 6-7 & Hex 8-9 (Docklands), Telecity Powergate (North London), Telecity Sovereign House (Docklands), Telehouse East, Telehouse North & Telehouse West (all three in Docklands), Telehouse Metro (London City) and Telstra London Hosting Centre (Docklands). Connectivity at all these facilities will be available in April 2014, while Virtus (Enfield) will be connected during the Summer 2014.