Lumen Expands Edge Reach Into Europe

Lumen Technologies expanded its edge network reach into Europe, looking to tap into its fiber backbone to support growing enterprise need for low-latency support on bare metal and in manufacturing locations. Lumen Technologies expanded its edge network reach into Europe, looking to tap into its fiber backbone to support growing enterprise need for low-latency support on bare metal and in manufacturing locations. The initial launch is around Lumen’s bare metal-as-a-service offering. This includes access to four Lumen services based around on-premises support. The first is Lumen’s Edge Bare Metal service that is dedicated, pay-as-you-go server hardware hosted in distributed locations and connected to Lumen’s global fiber network. This setup provides security benefits tied to the single tenancy servers that can isolate data and network traffic. The second is Lumen’s Edge Private Cloud that is a managed service using pre-built infrastructure connected to Lumen’s fiber network. It’s designed to speed up an enterprise’s go-to-market strategy. The third is Lumen’s Network Storage that provides customers with scalable storage from an edge location to meet low-latency requirements. The final piece is its Edge Gateway, which is a multi-access edge compute (MEC) platform for on-premises locations. It offers multi-vendor compute management for virtualized WAN, security, and IT applications in edge locations. The vendor said customers will be able to gain access to those services through the Lumen Edge Computing Solutions online portal. Lumen will provide those services to meet approximately 70% of enterprise demand within 5 milliseconds of latency in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Further European expansion is planned for later in the year. To support the expansion, Lumen deployed an additional 100-gigabit MPLS and IP network connectivity and increased power and cooling capabilities at some of its edge data center locations to deal with the increased workload. The vendor’s European footprint consists of approximately 42,000 route miles of fiber connecting to more than 2,500 on-net buildings and 540 public and private third-party data centers. Jeff Sieracki, senior director of product management at Lumen, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the service targets enterprises, with an initial focus on manufacturing and retail. “Manufacturing, particularly for smart manufacturing, they need to have that compute to be able to manage any robotics or IoT close to the premises if not on a premises,” Sieracki said. “If you have an entire network go down, or a cloud fail, or hyperscale cloud fail, as long as the compute is connected to your manufacturing facility, in proximity or on site, you can still continue your manufacturing process.” And for retail, Sieracki said the Lumen platform allows for compute resources to be removed from a “broom closet” on site and placed instead in a nearby location managed by Lumen. He did add that the company is looking at potential partnerships with hyperscalers, “not necessarily in selling to, but in working with them to enhance their cloud portfolio.” The expansion also helps bolster Lumen’s international presence. Sieracki explained that multinationals that take advantage of the new service will be able to manage their entire operations through a single pane of glass environment. Worldwide, Lumen manages and operates approximately 500,000 global route miles of fiber and more than 190,000 on-net buildings. These connect to 2,200 public and private third-party data centers and public cloud service providers. Lumen’s U.S.-based reach and capabilities were highlighted last year when it scored a deal with T-Mobile US in support of that carrier’s enterprise-focused 5G edge efforts. “We have put a large investment into this, and we believe it is an immense growth area. And the way the future is going, everything’s going to be digital software,” Sieracki said. “It’s not going to be buying speeds and feeds and enterprises connecting the parts. They want solutions. They want to look at it from the user and application perspective, not from what kind of network do I have in the ground connecting to what server and data center. We are separating that layer.”