EdgeConneX
It’s Game on for the Edge, and Game over for the Legacy Internet

Studies indicate that there are over 2.5 billion gamers worldwide, across a variety of gaming platforms: PC, console, cloud, mobile, etc. In many global markets over half of gaming takes place on mobile as users get more accustomed to playing the games they want, when they want, wherever they want. And more and more gamers are moving to Cloud Gaming platforms where games can be started on one device, paused, and resumed on another device or platform entirely. These trends show that the legacy Internet, largely routed through a small number of key peering points and satisfied with high rates of latency, was not designed for today’s gaming needs much less tomorrow’s. In the world of cutting-edge online gaming, gamers are involved in a bi-directional data flow, and any lag in the Internet connectivity means, game over. It goes without saying that ‘slow is the new down.’ Moreover, the cloud-based gaming platforms—accessed on consoles, phones, and computers—demand GPU-level power, upwards of several kilowatts per rack in a data center.

Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing Officer of EdgeConneX, a global data center operator, throws light on the problem in a broader sense. The growing breed of online gaming, content streaming, and cloud service providers places an unbearable burden on the Internet. And come the COVID–19 and the concomitant digital-only lifestyle, every smartphone and laptop has turned into a hub of Internet traffic. Something which the Internet, with the traditional centralized data center architecture, is not prepared to support.

EdgeConneX has found a solution to this massive problem. “We are here to join with our partners to rearchitect the Internet to meet the digital needs of people, today and tomorrow,” says Marangella. To support the increasing multi-directional traffic, the company envisions getting the data center closer to the edge in a distributed fashion to quell latency issues. With data centers serving as the local peering hub, service providers (including the largest networks, content streaming and digital media firms, and gaming companies) can smartly route the traffic between networks and end consumers. “That is our vision, to enable our customers to get an edge by going to the edge,” he adds.

At the outset of engagement with service providers, EdgeConneX determines the kind of data centers the customer is looking to build in terms of capacity, location, and timeline. The company builds those data centers, which can be anything between 100kW to 100MW capacity. Once the data centers, hyperscale or hyperlocal, are interconnected, companies can enable the superior experiences to their own customers that they have been aiming to achieve. EdgeConneX specifically looks for the optimal location, access to the available power capacity in that location, and power diversity. This overarching approach allows the company’s clients to maintain strong network availability with scalable and sustainable power and little to no downtime. “We are in more than 30 markets around the world where we have built nearly 50 data centers across a whole spectrum of sizes,” says Marangella.

"Slow is the new down"

To enter deeper into local markets quickly, EdgeConneX launched its small, highly efficient Edge data centers. Powered by a next-generation operating system, EdgeOS, EdgeConneX enables clients to manage multiple data centers remotely with a secure view of their infrastructure from a single pane of glass. The smart solution also allows clients to manage their workloads in the data center remotely, which has become even more critical during the times of COVID-19 when the ability to travel or visit a data center has been severely hindered.

We are here to join with our partners to rearchitect the Internet to meet the digital needs of people, today and tomorrow

With state-of-the-art of the art technologies, EdgeConneX has helped the gaming platforms like Nvidia deploy their gaming solutions to the edge by supporting dense power deployments through these edge data centers. It has also established various data centers across North America and has allowed several cloud gaming platforms to leverage its technology to deploy their games successfully. “With the proliferation of cloud in the future, we will continue to develop data center infrastructures worldwide to provide the required capacity to meet our clients’ needs at the edge,” ends Marangella.