Colocate in LA for Digital Transformation, Interconnection and Edge Computing

‍‍With a population of 10 million, Los Angeles isn’t only one of the largest metropolises in the world, it’s the place to be for businesses executing digital transformation, leveraging edge computing and expanding their operations to Asia Pacific and beyond. Media and entertainment companies have a large presence in LA, but so do social networking, cloud services, international and domestic carriers, gaming, banking, healthcare, advertising technology and streaming businesses. 

While companies collocate in LA data centers for different reasons, they all share the desire to gain a competitive edge through innovation, and by operating with greater efficiency and agility. They also share a common challenge: the incredible volume of data pouring into their worlds. In response, colocation facilities continue to scale up, and colocation providers play a more critical role than ever in enabling businesses to achieve their goals. 

Let’s ground that statement with a couple use cases and then dig into the solution details.

Edge Computing for Media and Entertainment 

Media and entertainment companies view the LA campus as a central hub for media. For example, a major studio deployed gear to support live streaming and live action films. After connecting with the Open Cloud Exchange® (OCX) and opening a port for one-to-many provisioning, the studio team realized that the OCX isn’t there just to connect to CSPs, they can use the OCX to exchange content with peers who are part of the production. With the OCX, stakeholders can share project-based digital workflows in colocation or the cloud – via secure, dedicated connections – then unplug after a project is completed. 

IaaS Provider Scales to Support Demand

An infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that operates a powerful global platform was facing a “good problem”: keeping pace with double-digit annual growth in the U.S. The issue was that their primary North American data center partner struggled to offer the scalability and the power required, resulting in delivery delays that reduced projected sales by up to 15 percent.

CoreSite’s Marketplace and Any2Exchange® service resolved the problem by enabling interconnection to thousands of prospective customers and partners as well as seamless internet peering. The rapid scalability and flexibility reduces time to market for their customers so much that the IaaS provider has seen a 40 percent increase in U.S.-based revenue.

Interconnection and Proximity

CoreSite’s three data centers form Los Angeles’s largest data center campus – a huge edge computing and interconnection hub centrally located in downtown LA – with over 50 MW capacity, covering 800,000 s.f. and offering one of the most robust ecosystems anywhere. The campus consists of:

• One Wilshire (LA1), one of the most connected buildings in the world. One Wilshire has been a meeting place for carriers to come together to exchange traffic since the late 1980s. By 2015, one-third of internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia passed through the building.*
• LA2, on north Alameda, was originally a terminal annex for the U.S. Postal Service. The massive 450,000 s.f. building was constructed with poured-in-place steel reinforced concrete, so it’s one of the most secure buildings in LA. It sits on the same high-priority utility grid as many LA government buildings and offers access to more than 330 carriers and the native cloud on ramps to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and IBM.
• LA3 is a brand-new facility with 150,000 s.f. and 18 MW capacity and sits adjacent to LA2. 
  

The data centers are tethered together by high-density dark fiber, so companies can cross-connect to anyone inside of LA1, LA2 or LA3 as if they’re deployed in the same building. The advantages? A centralized location for interoperating workloads enables shared access, security and reliability. Low-latency network solutions help ensure high application performance, whether it’s gaming, banking or edge computing. And, using CoreSite’s exchange platform the OCX reduces network costs and network hops, improving user experiences. 

Many businesses choose our LA campus because of its exceptional ecosystem. It offers private, direct connection to more than 670 potential business partners, including cloud service providers (CSPs), services companies, content delivery networks and network providers. The ecosystem features:

The major CSPs – the LA campus offers native on ramps to all of the major cloud providers including the only native connection to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute in LA

• 375+ domestic and international carriers
• Seven subsea cable networks
• 110+ cloud computing, storage, security and IT providers
• 300+ digital content and enterprise customers
  

Data Center Best Practices

The LA campus, like other CoreSite data centers, incorporates best practices:

• Guaranteed uptime, a 100% uptime SLA 
• In-house security and operations staff (employees, not contractors) and several layers of physical security to control access
• Certifications with HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53 and other regulations, with associated validation programs to ensure businesses meet their compliance requirements
• Customized design for each deployment taking into consideration each customer’s unique requirements for power, space and connectivity

The OCX provides enterprise-class connectivity services, automation and a single point of control. Virtual private connections can be set up in minutes, enabling businesses to reduce costs while streamlining transactions, data delivery, customer service and more. Through the OCX, customers can connect to all of CoreSite’s nationally connected campuses – from LA to Silicon Valley to data centers in the Midwest and on the East Coast – making it possible for businesses to easily and quickly expand operations.

Looking Ahead in LA

Several trends are likely to influence the future of the LA data center campus. Let’s start with public cloud adoption. Public clouds accelerate time-to-market for new projects and offer access to cloud-native tools and applications like AI and data analytics. Hybrid cloud architectures will continue to grow as CSPs add more offerings. Enterprises will continue to shift from on-premises data centers to colocation solutions in order to lower total cost of operations, expand global market reach, and more easily adopt 5G. 

If you want to dive into the LA campus details, download the brochure. Or, take a tour of a CoreSite data center and read about intermarket connectivity. To start a conversation about colocation, contact us.