Megaport, a leading global, Network as a Service (NaaS) provider, has announced an expanded service footprint and additional capabilities for its flagship virtual routing service, Megaport Cloud Router (MCR), which enables on-demand private connectivity at Layer 3 from 19 key metro routing zones throughout the world.
Megaport is a global interconnection fabric that has integrated a fully-hosted virtual routing service to leading cloud providers, offering direct connectivity to over 130 cloud onramps globally.
Virtual routing is the ability to intelligently route traffic to its destination from a virtual Point of Presence (PoP) without the need to own or manage a physical router.
An MCR instance may be used either with or without a physical Megaport connection. For today’s global businesses and government agencies undergoing Digital Transformation, MCR serves as a bridge to and between service providers, enabling cloud-to-cloud connections and allowing users to connect in ways that save time and reduce infrastructure management costs with unparalleled ease-of-use.
Benefits include:
• Simplicity: Extensive experience or knowledge in networking is not required to use MCR with ease;
• Reduce infrastructure management: MCR replaces dedicated enterprise hardware. This means greater reach as well as less time, less effort and less money spent to build and maintain a robust network;
• Improved multicloud performance: Customers can reduce latency by enabling direct connections among cloud providers and can utilise virtual routers to control and localise traffic.
MCR features include:
• Four speed tiers capable of 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps routing throughput;
• Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for BGP that allows for fast link failure detection supporting fast failover of routed traffic;
• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Multi Exit Discriminator (MED) to support Virtual Cross Connect (VXC) prioritisation that tells autonomous systems (AS) the preferred route to take for performance tuning;
• BGP shutdown toggle, so users can quickly turn BGP on or off;
• Google API optimisation to make it faster and easier to add MCR connections to the Google Cloud Platform and thus remove the need to click between Google and Megaport screens to establish a service.
Use cases include:
Hybrid cloud
An MCR with a Megaport connection enables hybrid connectivity between a private IT infrastructure and public cloud environments. An MCR closer to the enterprises’ cloud provider region allows smart routing decisions to be made remotely from the Megaport connection. This eliminates a need for hair pinning traffic back to the enterprise IT infrastructure on a VXC, reducing both latency and processing times.
Multi-cloud and multi-region
An MCR enables private multi-cloud access, in multiple global regions, with no physical infrastructure required. An MCR also allows customers to keep traffic closer to cloud service providers without the need to manage multiple connections back to a router in private IT infrastructure.
Cloud to cloud
As enterprises increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, MCR effortlessly enables agnostic cloud-provider connectivity for seamless, agile connections among cloud service providers including Alibaba, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce and SAP all without the need for physical infrastructure.
Global expansion
Leverage Megaport’s purpose-built Software Defined Network (SDN) combined with MCR’s virtualised routing capability to connect between key routing zones across North America, Asia and Europe. By partnering with 92 data centre operators globally, Megaport enables a provider agnostic solution in key enterprise locations.
“Megaport’s mission is to reduce the complexity of getting connected in a cloud-enabled world,” said Vincent English, CEO of Megaport. “MCR allows our customers to take advantage of powerful networking capabilities without having to be an expert network engineer.
“Organisations can spin up virtual routers on demand to connect faster while saving on resources and costs, all while controlling traffic in the cloud. This truly makes building network connections an intuitive, as-a-service experience.”
“Our goal with the expansion of MCR was to make it as simple as possible for customers to utilise their service providers of choice,” said John Veizades, Vice President of Engineering and Product at Megaport. “We’re integrating MCR with leading cloud providers to remove barriers to adopting cloud services and enable ease-of-use for inter-cloud connectivity. Our customers can provision point-and-click cloud-to-cloud connections as they build their multicloud architectures.”
