Megaport adds new capabilities in cloud router service

Network-as-a-service provider Megaport has expanded its service footprint and added additional capabilities for its Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) service.

MCR enables layer 3 private connectivity on demand from 19 metro zones across Asia Pacific, Europe, the United States and Canada.

"Our goal with the expansion of MCR was to make it as simple as possible for customers to utilize their service providers of choice," says Megaport vice president of engineering and product, John Veizades.

"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."

Megaport says its interconnection fabric integrated a fully-hosted virtual routing service to cloud providers, with direct connectivity to more than 130 cloud onramps.

"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," the company explains.

"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.

By partnering with 92 data center 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," says Megaport CEO Vincent English.

"MCR allows our customers to take advantage of powerful networking capabilities without having to be an expert network engineer. Organizations 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."

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) prioritization 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; and
   
• Google API optimization 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.

The Megaport Cloud Router is currently available in:

Australia - Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth

Asia - Hong Kong, and Singapore

USA - Ashburn, San Jose, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, New York, and Las Vegas

Canada - Montreal

Europe - London, Dublin, Frankfurt, Stockholm, and Berlin.