5 ways to reduce advertising network latency

European infrastructure-as-a-service provider CloudSigma has followed in the steps of Amazon and Microsoft to offer a direct connection between private servers in colocation facilities and its cloud.

The "hybrid hosting" service was announced by the company on Wednesday, and will see it give customers the option of renting colocation servers in an Interxion facility in Zurich, the Switch SuperNAP in Las Vegas, and Equinix data centers around the world, then getting a direct line into its cloud as well.

Theoretically, this allows you to burst capacity into the pool of SSD-backed gear in CloudSigma's IaaS service, but spend most of your time chugging away on cheaper prepaid colocation servers.

The hybrid hosting service can give either a 1GbE or 10GbE private patch into the CloudSigma network, and customers can tap the cloud for DDoS protection systems, redundant routing, and external IP connectivity services. In addition, CloudSigma will offer customers a rebate on spending on its cloud of up to 20 percent of their private hosting costs.

This type of colo-public cloud approach was pioneered by Amazon Web Services with its DirectConnect tech, which launched in August 2011 and saw Bezos & Co. partner with Equinix. That was followed by Microsoft, which has teamed up with AT&T to offer a similar service starting in 2014.

This approach means customers can minimize their own on-premises gear, and can get the elasticity benefits of a cloud infrastructure, but with guaranteed control over important hardware in the colocation facilities as well.

CloudSigma is still rather small, though, with about 2PB of flash-backed storage capacity under management, so major customers may want to think twice lest they overwhelm the company's bit barns.

But the company does offer hope to admins with security worries about US intelligence agencies slurping data, because the company is actually two companies: one, CloudSigma Inc., is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, while CloudSigma AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. This legal and geographical partition between the regions may offer some security-conscious companies a scrap of hope, in their quest for an unfiddled-with third-party IT provider. ®

5 ways to reduce advertising network latency