Cyxtera Technologies has launched the Cyxtera Extensible Data Center (CXD) platform, a software platform for data centers that offers customers rapid on-demand provisioning to a host of colocation and connectivity services.
Through a combination of a network and services provisioning engine and an intra-data center software-defined network fabric, the CXD platform allows colocation customers to provision services on demand or via a web console.
CXD brings cloud-like experience to colocation
CXD comes with two key features: the Unified Services Port and Network Exchange. The Unified Services Port enables access to multiple data center services over a single physical port, while the Network Exchange provides automated provisioning to select network service providers. The caveat is they must also be running CXD.
This allows customers to run distributed environments within and across data centers without having to allocate more hardware and floor space, and they can provision compute in minutes or hours. The company made a point of touting its burst capacity capabilities
“It can take months to deploy a single application, from provisioning circuits to building out infrastructure in a colocation cage. CXD brings ‘speed of cloud’ power and provisioning to an entire range of data center services with an extensible software-powered architecture that will rapidly integrate Cyxtera-powered services and those of our network and service provider ecosystem,” said Randy Rowland, president and general manager of data center services for Cyxtera, in a statement.
The service benefits both customers, who can reduce the time to deploy new or additional infrastructure from weeks or even months down to hours, while cloud or host providers can use CXD Nodes to quickly and automatically add new capacity to new or existing customers without requiring human intervention.
CXD Compute Nodes offers one-click application management
Cyxtera also announced CXD Compute Nodes, an on-demand hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution using Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software. This service offers one-click application management across a distributed public and private infrastructure in as little as a third of the time needed. Customers can provision dedicated HCI nodes on demand via the CXD API or web console, which reduces time to deployment and staffing needs.
Cyxtera Technologies is a spinoff from CenturyLink’s data centers, which were bought by consortium of investors last year. The idea behind CXD is that customers want to have the ability to provision their own data centers like they do in a colocation model, but without the cost and headaches associated with it. Instead of taking months to deploy nodes, Cyxtera promises provisioning in one business day.
