Exodus expands metro Ethernet services via Telseon

SANTA CLARA - Exodus Communications data center customers who want fast, large-capacity connections between their offices and hosted systems can now get the service directly from Exodus, thanks to its partnerships with metropolitan Ethernet service providers.

Exodus recently said it will resell services from Telseon, following an earlier announcement that it entered into a reseller agreement with Yipes Communications, a Telseon competitor.

Scott Emo, director of product marketing for Exodus, says partnerships with other metropolitan-area network providers can be expected as Exodus expands its network to link with customer sites. In addition to giving existing customers the ability to connect Exodus-hosted systems with their offices and business partners, the expanded network will provide a greater opportunity for Exodus to offer bandwidth-intensive services such as storage and tape backup services to new users, Emo says.

Andrew Feldman, a vice president at Santa Clara firm Riverstone Networks, hosts applications and storage systems with Exodus and contracted with Telseon separately to get the bandwidth those systems demanded.

"It would have been a whole lot easier for me if I went to one place and boom, they showed me a brochure and said, 'Here, you want a 50 [M bit/sec] service? I've got that. I'll get that right to your cage,' " he says.

Feldman says Riverstone now can make additional use of Exodus, such as housing streaming videos for sales training.

"What the Telseon service enables me to do is to utilize what Exodus is good at - the content hosting, the value-added services - and get them to me at a speed that enables me to use all these fun tools," he says.

Telseon is deployed in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas, but the first Exodus data centers to be connected will be in the Silicon Valley, New Jersey, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The Yipes service is initially available in Boston, Chicago and the Silicon Valley.

Customers buy the Telseon service from Exodus, which charges a one-time setup fee, and then a monthly fee for access and capacity. Telseon offers bandwidth on-demand in increments from 1M to 1,000M bit/sec via a Web-based provisioning system.

Exodus: www.exodus.com; Telseon: www.telseon.com; Yipes: www.yipes.com