Flexential, a leading provider of infrastructure data center colocation, cloud and connectivity, announced today it is launching the first Flexential Local Edge solution by working with American Tower, a leading wireless tower communications infrastructure provider. Flexential Local Edge is a remote data center providing colocation services and access to the FlexAnywhere™ platform, making connectivity easy for edge applications. The first Flexential Local Edge will utilize American Tower’s Edge Data Center at a tower in Atlanta, connected with Colo Atl, an American Tower company, which offers superior carrier-neutral colocation and interconnection services at 55 Marietta Street in the global telecom hub of Atlanta. Atlanta is one of three locations where Flexential will be using American Tower Edge Data Center infrastructure, with plans to expand in Denver and Boulder, Colorado.
Flexential Local Edge empowers customers to deploy hardware and software very close to the end-user or application – at the edge, in professionally designed, maintained and connected edge data centers. This partnership pushes beyond the four walls of traditional data centers to connect businesses to their customers with the lowest latency, highest security and most comprehensive network services possible very near the end-user. In addition, Flexential Local Edge allows customers to tap into the Flexential cloud portfolio of solutions, including cloud computing, Storage-as-a-Service, Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service and more.
“By combining our strengths with these partners, we can leverage the FlexAnywhere network to offer our customers the means to drive edge computing even further than it has been – not just to the metro area but also to the street level,” said Flexential Chief Executive Officer Chris Downie. “This is an exciting advancement lowering latency to our customers in various industries, including transportation, logistics, finance, gaming and healthcare, supporting a variety of IoT, video, AI, and other real-time dynamic applications. Local Edge will push to use 5G and AI in a more meaningful way for traffic controls, autonomous vehicles, infrastructure monitoring and more. We see this an opportunity in many markets around the country to provide a true differentiator.”
With COVID-19 increasing the adoption of work-from-home initiatives and video applications, telemedicine and remote learning, more businesses seek to deploy low latency applications to improve the overall customer and employee experience.
KORE Wireless Group is a Flexential partner and leading IoT solutions enabler. “As applications demand lower latency connectivity and more resources to support analytics at the local edge, it’s critical enterprises and the public sector have more options to deploy their platforms closer to end users and IoT endpoints,” said KORE Senior Vice President of Information Technology and Security, Chris Francosky. “Security, reliability and access to high-quality networks are key elements to support an edge application architecture. Given their expertise in these areas, combined with upstream access to world-class core data center facilities, Flexential is uniquely positioned to deliver complete edge computing environments to their customers.”
The FlexAnywhere fabric uses the scalable 100Gbps backbone, which provides built-in access to Flexential’s national fleet of next-generation data centers, premium IP blend, and cloud connectivity to public clouds AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. Combining FlexAnywhere and this network of communications towers allows companies to deploy edge native applications with trusted connectivity services for higher resiliency, data security and peace of mind that services will always be available – at more locations than ever before.
