ANXeBusiness Plans Private Networking for Cloud Computing

Providing Optimized Access to Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Service

A few weeks ago I concluded a short series on cloud computing and networking with a blog about building a private extranet for cloud computing. A private extranet service that would link existing enterprise IP VPNs (MPLS-based) into a cloud provider's service would ensure optimal routing, guaranteed bandwidth, QoS, and better security.

In that blog, I wrote about the ANX Network which serves thousands of customers with a private extranet service originally built to interconnect automotive companies.

That blog led to a nice discussion with Dennis Piche — Director of Engineering at ANXeBusiness. Dennis went over ANX's background and growth, including organic and via acquisitions. ANX has transitioned over 90% of customers to its MPLS-based IP VPN services which provides carrier agnostic access to services. Partner telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, connect customers into the ANX network via their own MPLS services. Communications between the carriers is provided by ANX's gateways. ANX provides strict SLAs, managed network services, and a common QoS model which marks packets accordingly into different MPLS provider queues at the gateways. This allows companies to communicate with each other over a private network instead of using the Internet.

This private extranet service has positioned ANX well to partner with cloud providers. Cloud companies will provide the compute services while ANX provides the optimized network access to those clouds. A very nice combination.

One of the cloud companies ANX may partner with is Amazon. Amazon, via its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service, already allows customers to carve out a private portion of EC2 services.

VPC is intriguing because it really is an extension of your internal network via IPSec VPN. Customers can even use their own address space with subnetting inside the EC2 service.

However, connectivity using Amazon VPC is still through the Internet. Enter ANX with its mature, carrier agnostic private extranet. Now EC2 customers could connect to Amazon's cloud services with strict network SLAs and QoS. Moving application demand into the cloud would be faster and users would be serviced more efficiently. This is an intriguing business model for carriers and cloud providers to partner on. ANX is ahead of the game.

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A Private Extranet for Cloud Computing

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• Amazon
• ANX
• cloud computing
• ec2
• extranet
• QoS
• Verizon
• vPC