Unlocking Business Potential with Carrier Hotels

60 Hudson Street in New York City occupies an entire city block in Manhattan — a pretty valuable bit of real estate. Originally known as the Western Union building, this 1930 art-deco-style beauty once served as the technological center of the global telegraph system. Today, it serves as the modern version of a technological epicenter, housing network infrastructure for hundreds of telecom and IT service providers. Carrier density is so strong that subsea cable developers terminated their intercontinental links spanning the Atlantic Ocean in this very building. It’s known in the industry as a “carrier hotel,” a moniker given only to the most interconnected downtown data centers, those that serve as the center of connectivity for that region. At least one carrier hotel can be found in every major city across the country.

The value of carrier hotels

Organizations of all stripes find tremendous value deploying workloads directly within these robust network ecosystems, to maximize global reach. Doing so offers the ability to optimize end-user experience for disparate, far-reaching audiences from a single physical location, since the plethora of networks combined have tentacles in virtually every populated corner of the planet. Rackspace now offers colocation services from several carrier hotels, including 60 Hudson. These sites are such coveted havens for network and IT deployments that their addresses are brand names in themselves:

• 250 Williams Street, Atlanta GA
• 350 East Cermak, Chicago, IL
• 60 Hudson Street, New York, NY
• 32 Avenue of Americas, New York NY
• 120 E. Van Buren, Phoenix, AZ
• 200 Paul Avenue, San Francisco, CA

Although they are not carrier hotels per se (since they’re located in suburban areas and not city centers), we’ve also added the following highly-connected data centers to our colocation offering:

• 44274 Roundtable Plaza, Ashburn, VA
• 100 Delawana Avenue, Clifton, NJ
• 2 Peekay Drive, Clifton, NJ
• 3825 NW Aloclek, Place, Hillsboro, OR

The Rackspace colocation difference

At each of these locations, we offer colocation services for customer-owned gear, enhanced with Rackspace’s Fanatical Experience. [Read more about the benefits of colocation: Colocation Explained for Business Leaders] Smart companies recognize there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to their IT transformation; for many, colocation will play a critical role. Rackspace meets customers wherever they are on their journey to digital transformation; our experts begin by understanding your business goals, then craft a set of solutions to make those goals a reality. Fanatical Experience is what sets Rackspace’s colocation services apart from the pack. We offer a one-hour response time SLA as part of Smart Hands, our white glove service for any physical touches a customer needs us to execute on their hardware — unmatched in the world of colocation. We also offer a blended bandwidth service and a software-defined interconnection solution, which allows customers to virtually connect to a multitude of cloud providers and other data centers via a single physical connection. In addition to colocation services, these data centers are also perfect for our Private Cloud Everywhere solution, for customers looking for a fully managed, hyper converged IT solution. [Read more: Rackspace Expands VMware Private Cloud as a Service to Customer Data Centers] If your organization is ready to get out of the data center business, but isn’t ready to move everything to the cloud, talk to one of our experts today about Rackspace Colocation and Infrastructure Management.