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Data Center Interconnect (DCI) has long been a core aspect of enterprise wide area networks (WANs) but it is undergoing a significant evolution now because of the need for greater business agility driven by digital and cloud transformation, according to PacketFabric.

Although enterprise IT has largely shifted to a hybrid and multicloud-based stance, in many cases, DCI is still done via long-term fixed telco contracts for Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) or wavelength services that just do not offer the flexibility that enterprises need today for business and cloud agility, PacketFabric says, noting “there is a better way” with Network-as-a-Service (NaaS).

DCI technology and consumption models have “evolved beyond inflexible, long-term wavelength and Ethernet service contracts,” according to the company, which notes that it offers companies an agile DCI solution, with on-demand Ethernet Private Line (EPL) and Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) leveraging a global, 50-plus-Terabit optical transport network consumed flexibly by the month or for longer terms.

“If we think back, way back in time [although] this is not just all historical – this is still today for many organizations but it’s changing rapidly… most enterprises pretty much were using” a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) WAN, Alex Henthorn-Iwane, CMO at PacketFabric, said July 14 during the webinar “How to Build Agile Data Center Interconnect with NaaS.”

In the past, as part of the MPLS WAN architecture, multiple sites all functioned as peers around that WAN, he noted. “Essentially, you connected site-to-site” with virtual circuits (VCs) and “you had your own all-premise data centers and they could be sort of dedicated facilities,” he noted. “In a lot of cases, they were actually just [spaces] – they used to call these computer rooms – but they were data center space you might build in a facility that also housed other personnel or other things.”

In addition to that, there were remote users and they “kind of hung off of the data centers in some fashion,” he said.

“That was sort of the old world, when you owned everything and you controlled everything,” he noted. “But that’s changing because enterprises have really gone to hybrid and multi-cloud [strategies],” he said, pointing to data showing that about 93% of enterprises now have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy. No matter what analyst’s data you look at, however, the figure is somewhere in the 90s percentage range, he added.

Traditional telco and Internet-based options have been holding many organizations’ cloud core architectures back, according to PacketFabric.

This “digital transformation” for organizations has happened because “everything’s moving way faster in terms of how you need to interact with your customers [and] how you need to enable employees,” Henthorn-Iwane explained. Greater agility is needed by organizations now, he noted.

As part of the new and more agile system that more organizations are using, the DCI is part of a new Enterprise Cloud Core architecture in which “all the mission-critical workflows… are happening across a core that’s constituted by increasingly co-location-based data centers, as well as public cloud providers,” enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) including Salesforce, Cisco’s Webex and Zoom, and “then also alternative cloud providers because you’re choosing your locations for cloud and data centers not based on brand primarily but on which services you want to use… and best-of-breed locations that serve your business,” he explained.

Lee Coriell, sales engineer at PacketFabric, went to provide a demonstration of the services that the company offers and how they work.

The company showed what it looks like in real life to provision DCI in just minutes via a self-service portal instead of waiting weeks or months to make things happen.

Click here to view the entire webinar.