Iron Mountain Launches Network Services

For regulated industries, managing carrier relationships and provisioning network services between data center locations is complicated, time consuming and can tax scarce internal resources.

To address these challenges, Iron Mountain Incorporated has expanded its portfolio of data center services with Total Network Services, providing quality, low-cost connectivity to enterprise data center customers.

The new service makes it easier for customers to buy network services and manage carrier relationships, resulting in increased efficiencies and reduced costs.

With the new, carrier-neutral offering, Iron Mountain provides business-critical network connectivity along with a range of network offerings. The Total Network Services offering equips organizations with connectivity, custom provisioning services between locations and carrier relationship management – services not typically offered by data center providers.

Available, the total network services portfolio supports a variety of managed services, including:

• 10GB and 1GB protected Ethernet transport to carrier hotels
• Managed carrier services
• Internet services, including high-speed 10GbE connectivity via border gateway protocol (BGP) multi-homing
• End-to-end connectivity for national and international Ethernet transport between data centers
• Encryption services utilizing customer-held private keys
• Dark fiber connectivity between in-metro customer and data center sites

Advanced Network Technology
“Iron Mountain’s Total Network Services offering leverages carrier-grade technology like optical transport and software-defined networking to solve the headaches commonly associated with data center management and ensure our customers don’t overprovision or overpay,” said Dan Golding, VP operations, Iron Mountain. “With our latest data center solution, enterprise customers can provision their network with the bandwidth needed to support current and emerging business demands.“

Iron Mountain has deployed Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology to overcome the technical limitations associated with legacy fiber cross connects, eliminating tangled messes of cables and making the addition or movement of connections clean and easy. By utilizing SDN, Iron Mountain allows multiple traffic types to be distributed throughout the data center in a redundant fashion on a fiber ring network. This approach helps organizations reduce hardware costs, accelerate provisioning, protect against fiber cuts and transport bandwidth on demand across the network.

Many enterprises operate more than one data center and need constant connectivity between facilities or with HQs. Total Network Services also feature optical transport technology, the global standard for network communications protocol that improves connectivity between facilities by leveraging a fiber-rich, carrier-neutral and near limitless bandwidth pipeline. The service ensures constant connectivity between multiple data center facilities.

Carrier Partnerships
Iron Mountain has a strong belief in network neutrality and its value to data center customers. For that reason, its data centers have a variety of network services available within its colocation facilities and offered through a growing number of carrier partners. Lumos Networks Corp and Lightower Fiber Networks, LLC are two providers that offer high-capacity, all-fiber network services.

“Our partnership with Iron Mountain offers organizations a more responsive network experience over Lumos Networks’ expanding optical bandwidth infrastructure in Western Pennsylvania. Iron Mountain’s Total Network Services approach pushes the envelope on customer centricity in data center services facilitated by a fiber-based network layer with 100Gbps and higher bandwidth potential,” said Craig Drinkhall, CTO, Lumos Networks. “IT departments now have the ability to increase bandwidth in days versus weeks which is ideal for managing fast-moving business conditions.“

“With this new service , customers will be able to access Iron Mountain’s new data centers from anywhere in Lightower’s footprint of more than 20,000 route miles of network throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions and metro Chicago area,” stated Rob Shanahan, CEO, Lightower Fiber Networks. “Combining Iron Mountain’s new digital solutions with Lightower’s dense, all-fiber network creates a powerful solution for customers requiring mission critical data archival and networking solutions.”