By Todd R. Weiss

Eight months after debuting its Cyxtera Extensible Data Center (CXD) platform in Dallas, the company has now expanded CXD services to Washington, D.C., and London, with additional plans to bring it into New York, Chicago, Silicon Valley and Phoenix in early 2019.

CXD compute nodes allow users to dynamically configure connectivity and dedicated hyperconverged infrastructure on-demand within and across Cyxtera’s colocation data centers through a web portal and API to run new workloads or applications. Using the company’s infrastructure, customers can have their colocation operations available in less than a day instead of in weeks or months, according to the company.

Cyxtera’s Randy Rowland

“We looked to shorten the typical six-month timeframe” for such deployments, Randy Rowland, the president of Cyxtera’s data center services, told Channel Partners. “We designed it for cloud service providers, managed hosting companies and others. We put the equipment in and have it set up based on what we see customers installing in the past. What we are trying to do is stitch together what customers are going to install anyway.”

By equipping and configuring the infrastructure ahead of time, Cyxtera can make it ready for customers on the fly and allow them to connect it for users quickly, he said. “It lets them add capacity in minutes to an hour.”

The additional cities being added follow the success of the initial services launch in Dallas in April, said Rowland.

CXD uses a secure software-defined network fabric to link customers and resources throughout the data center, assuring that each customer’s traffic is isolated and protected through the use of VXLAN protocol. Private virtual Layer 2 networks can be defined, provisioned, and configured through the CXD APIs or web console, according to the company. All CXD services are delivered over a Unified Services Port, which can be used for a single service or for stacked multiple services.

Cyxtera unveiled and launched CXD in April 2018, about 11 months after the company began operations. Cyxtera was created by private equity firms BC Partners and Medina Capital through the acquisitions of data centers and colocation operations owned by the former CenturyLink and of Medina Capital’s security and data analytics portfolio. Cyxtera runs 57 data centers around the world and serves more than 3,500 customers.

The expanded CXD services are aimed at helping customers simplify their moves to colocation and sharply shave the time necessary to deploy colocation services, said Rowland.

“We remove the barriers to bringing in your equipment,” he said. “As long as we have that three- to six-month impediment to getting started, people will find another alternative in the cloud. We think this is the future of our industry.”

Cyxtera offers its products and services through its reseller channel and referral program, which includes network service providers, cloud service providers, SaaS partners, systems integrators,  VARs, distributors and real estate brokers and agents who specialize in the real estate where the company’s data centers are located.

Pegasus Technology Solutions’ Steve Barnett

Steve Barnett, the vice president of sales for Pegasus Technology Solutions, an MSP in Frisco, Texas, and a partner of Cyxtera, told Channel Partners that his company has moved its hosted MSP service onto the CXD platform, which gives their customers a higher level of support and services. Pegasus has been working with Cyxtera since Cyxtera began operations.

“It gave us the ability to expand rapidly and opened us up to much more business,” he said. “Typically, when you do colocation, you’ve got all this individual stuff on a price quote. With CXD, forget about all that, it’s all included. It comes to you in a single node quote with everything. ”

Customers can then choose and add …

… the bandwidth they want and can have a node up and running in an hour or can add new nodes to a cluster, said Barnett.

“To me, that’s a game changer and makes colocation public cloud-like,” he said. “I can sell a customer whatever they need on the fly. It makes it easier and faster to sell.”

Another major benefit for users of the CXD services is the bulletproof nature of the product, said Barnett. “This is being managed by professionals who are experts at it, so I don’t have to worry about turnover in my organization” by IT staffers who might leave him shorthanded.

“We can provision it quickly and its secure from Cyxtera,” he said. “From an operations perspective, it’s simplified what we do. We no longer have to be concerned about provisioning hardware or racks. If we need bandwidth can just add it. From a customer perspective, it allows us to have more focus on their applications and operations at all times, which makes our service to customers better.”