Data Center Provider InfoRelay Selects Ekinops to Interconnect Washington, D.C., Area Facilities

The regional network includes InfoRelay’s latest data center, Dulles Exchange, in Herndon, Virginia, which is being inaugurated Thursday with a grand opening celebration.

Ekinops, a leading supplier of next generation optical transport equipment, is supplying InfoRelay with its Ekinops 360 transport platform. InfoRelay will take advantage of Ekinops’ ability to flexibly and efficiently aggregate multiple service types and rates over fiber. The initial deployment will provide transport for Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and 10G LAN services over a high-capacity fiber-optic infrastructure.

InfoRelay was looking for a solution to link its four data center operations in northern Virginia which are home to a large variety of network providers, Federal clients, and large enterprise customers. InfoRelay evaluated the Ekinops solution along with several other manufacturers’ products and chose Ekinops following nearly a two-month trial.

“We needed a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution that supported all the necessary protocols, such as Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, video, and SONET,” explained Russell Weiss, president of InfoRelay. “We were also looking for a platform that would allow us to provide lit services to those strategic customers of ours looking for bandwidth between facilities. We found that Ekinops provided us with that flexibility at the right price points and our trial confirmed that the Ekinops solution was the right choice.”

InfoRelay, founded in 1995, provides on-demand data center and cloud hosting services, guaranteeing 99.999 percent up-time with extremely low latency to almost anywhere in the world. Its extensive service portfolio includes colocation, bandwidth, metro ethernet and more, with overall network capacity exceeding 200 Gbps of Internet connectivity. Like its other facilities, InfoRelay’s new Dulles Exchange data center is highly secure, diversely connected to multiple fiber networks, and has a highly redundant infrastructure.

“With the advent of cloud computing, data centers are seeing a surge in capacity requirements for interconnecting their facilities,” said Rob Adams, vice president of global marketing for Ekinops. “They require a platform that is operationally simple and extremely reliable, making our 360 platform the ideal choice.”

The Ekinops 360 is Ekinops' flagship next-generation optical transport platform, providing DWDM and CWDM (dense and coarse wavelength division multiplexing) on a single platform for metro, regional, and long-haul applications. It handles service rates from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps. It offers a broad portfolio of services including SONET/SDH, Fibre Channel, FICON, video, Ethernet, and Infiniband.