Latency Matters

from tmcnet.com:

>>Controlling latency was among the key drivers of Equinix’s recent purchase of Switch and Data, says Jarrett Appleby, chief marketing officer at Equinix, which sells data center space, power, cooling and the ability to interconnect with others.

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Appleby calls the data center “the new network hub of this century.”

“The data center is becoming the new interconnection hub for the convergence of network and services,” he says. “It’s kind of like the wave we rode 7 or 8 years ago with the Internet peering community. The networks needed to interconnect with the content guys, and what that drove is that rapid growth rate and the need for making it easier to exchange data for Internet, which evolved to video and content distribution worldwide. The big folks we were working with were the Googles and the Microsofts and the Yahoos of the world.”

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“You need to get these WAN solutions and new interconnection hubs really close to customers,” Appleby says. “So we were asked to go to places like Seattle and Denver, Miami and Toronto and Atlanta were the big five. And along for the ride came an even deeper penetration into Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Boston and places like that. So it moved us from a U.S./North America coverage from roughly 30-millisecond latency for 95 percent of the population and for enterprise clients to within less than 10 milliseconds away for 94 percent of the U.S. population.”

That 20 millisecond difference is important, he notes, because it can have a significant impact on how the application performs and, thus, the end user quality of experience. And while that applies to a variety of applications, the big driver of the push to lower latency by bringing content closer to the edge is cloud services, says Appleby of Equinix, which has more than 130 cloud and SaaS companies (like Amazon) within its data center and colocation sites.