Fast-growing colocation provider CyrusOne is continuing its use of BTI's 7800 platform for 100G data center interconnection needs, proving that the small vendor hasn't lost its ability to win repeat business for DCI even with a flood of new competitive gear entering the market.

Josh Snowhorn, vice president and general manager of interconnection for CyrusOne , tells Light Reading that BTI Systems Inc. had the right combination of low cost and high performance to win the day. "We looked at cost, scalability and long-term ease of management," he says. "The BTI platform at its cost basis and performance in the metro specifically, allowed us to forego doing a lot of edge switches, which saved us a lot of money upfront." (See CyrusOne Expands BTI Deployment.)

CyrusOne first deployed BTI's 7800 Series Intelligent Cloud Connect gear last year. The operator had been using Infinera Corp. (Nasdaq: INFN)'s DTN platform. "The cost to run Infinera for us was quite high, and the DTN is a long-haul box, not a metro box, which is what we were looking for," he says. (See BTI Adds Carrier Ethernet Products, Joins CEF.)

But for most of last year, BTI was relatively alone as a vendor shipping a metro-focused DCI platform with 100G capability. That is changing rapidly: Infinera, for its part, started shipping the Cloud Xpress, its own metro DCI platform months ago in 10G and 40G flavors, with 100G coming soon. Several other vendors also have been touting new dedicated metro DCI gear or metro DCI use cases. (See Infinera Unveils 100GE Cloud Xpress, Ciena Surfs DCI Wave With New Platform and Coriant 7100 Pico Targets Metro Edge.)

Snowhorn says CyrusOne didn’t just re-up with BTI without checking out all the new gear. "We looked at Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN), MRV Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: MRVC), ADVA Optical Networking , Infinera, BTI and some other smaller startups, and it came down to Infinera and BTI. The BTI platform with its scalability to 8.6 Terabits per chassis gave us an efficient path. The [Infinera] Cloud Xpress was fine, but we saw it as a stacking unit."

Want to know more about trends in data center interconnection? Check out our dedicated data center interconnect content channel right here on Light Reading.

CyrusOne's new Sterling, Va., data center, which the 7800 is serving, looks a lot like the vanguard of the next generation of data centers: A massive 14-acre site, home to a 400,000 square foot shell being built out in phases. The first phase, a 146,000-square-foot building with 16,000 square feet of office space and the capacity for up to 12 megawatts of critical load, opened in May. As CyrusOne continues to expand in Northern Virginia and elsewhere, its DCI needs will grow just as fast, and the competition among vendors to get a piece of its business will only intensify.

"We will continue to take a look at everything else that's out there," Snowhorn says. "We'd be remiss not to test the new stuff. But, we'd also go back to BTI and ask them to be creative and see what they can do for us. Someone else would really have to knock it out of the park with some new technology, and BTI would really have to fall over for us to go with someone else right now."

— Dan O'Shea, Managing Editor, Light Reading