State of the (Voxel) Network Address

from the Voxel blog, a few interesting Equinix notes:

>>First, I’m pleased to announce the expansion of the Voxel network to Seattle, WA.

Not to overshadow this announcement, Voxel has also gone live with its Singapore (SIN1) facility, our first deployment in Asia. We are providing our full suite of services, including virtualized and dedicated server hosting and content delivery, out of this location.

Some notes from the field:

Why Singapore?

Raj, our CEO, posted to our blog last summer, explaining our reasons for opening an office in Singapore:

http://www.voxel.net/blog/2008/08/singapore-inc-here-we-come/

With an office in place, opening a datacenter in Asia was next on our plate. Singapore appealed to us for a number of reasons:

1. It was “centrally” located, providing reasonable path latencies and transport options into Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, and mainland China, to name a few locations.
2. We were able to find a datacenter with plenty of available space and power, and reasonable connectivity options out.
3. Having an office in close proximity makes operations easy, even as we develop infrastructure and systems to keep our staff away as much as possible.

Facilities

We decided to go with Equinix as our facilities provider, occupying a large caged suite in their flagship “SG1″ facility. We searched long and hard, and found Equinix to be the best solution as a neutral facility in the country, with vendor and peering options blowing away the competition. At the risk of sounding like a press release, the Equinix Asia folk are true professionals, continually setting a high bar and proceeding to meet or exceed expectations. Thanks to the tireless efforts of their sales, project management, and network teams, we were able to turn up with no major snags, and following a fairly aggressive schedule. I’d highly recommend them to any organization looking to expand into the Asian market and unable to have all their needs met by Voxel directly.

(One anecdote here: you can e-mail Equinix’s Asia support center at any time, day or night, with odd requests such as “hey, could you please grab a laptop, console up this newly-arrived device, and give it an IP and local login?” and receive a call ten minutes later asking if you’re able to log in. Remote-hands organizations elsewhere would be well-served to follow this lead!)