Network provider Lumen is launching its Edge platform in Europe.
The company, previously the enterprise business of US telco CenturyLink, has had an Edge network available in the US, offering low latency connectivity to support data intensive applications at the cloud edge. Now it is offering the same service in Europe, with low latency claims for the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
"Edge computing is a game-changer. It will drive the next wave of business innovation and growth across virtually all industries," said Annette Murphy, regional president, EMEA and APAC, Lumen Technologies. "Customers in Europe can now tap into the power of the Lumen platform, underpinned by Lumen's extensive fiber footprint, to deploy data-heavy applications and workloads that demand ultra-low latency at the cloud edge. Customers can focus efforts on developing applications and bringing them to market, rather than on time-consuming infrastructure deployment."
The company claims to be able to meet approximately 70 percent of enterprise demand within 5 milliseconds of latency in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and plans to reach further locations by the end of 2022.
The service is based on Lumen's global fiber network with on-demand network services and integrated security. It also includes edge facilities, with compute and storage services. These facilities cover a lot of points on a map, and Lumen provides a list of data center locations, which includes some facilities owned by Lumen (such as 6 Braham Street London), and some owned by other providers such as Global Switch at 240 East India Dock Road, London. DCD has contacted Lumen to ask for more details.
Services offered on Lumen's Edge platform include Lumen Edge Bare Metal (pay-as-you-go server hardware), Lumen Network Storage, Lumen Edge Private Cloud, which includes pre-built infrastructure for private cloud connected to Lumen's global fiber, and Lumen Edge Gateway, which is a scalable multi-access Edge compute (MEC) platform, ie an on-premises server offering virtualized wide-area networking (WAN), security, and IT applications from multiple vendors.
To get its European Edge service up and running, Lumen added 100G MPLS and IP network connectivity, and increased power and cooling at key Edge data center locations.
Lumen has around 500,000 (805,000 km) global route miles of fiber and more than 190,000 on-net buildings, connected to 2,200 public and private third-party data centers and leading public cloud service providers.
In EMEA, the company says it has around 42,000 (67,000 km) route miles of fiber, connected to 2,500 on-net buildings including 540 public and private third-party data centers.
