ASP & your hybrid cloud with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute

ASP has deployed a redundant connectivity (with Azure ExpressRoute) to Azure in its data center location at InterXion. This will give our customers the possibility to build a hybrid cloud from within a secured data center to the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

What is Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute?

Azure ExpressRoute creates a private connection between Azure data centers and ASP’s own public cloud and private cloud. ExpressRoute connections don’t go via the public Internet. They offer more reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies than typical Internet connections. In some cases, using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premises systems and Azure can yield significant cost benefits. We will be able to leverage our local ISP backbone with DDoS protection for our customers and offer them additional choices and resources in the Azure Cloud.

Benefits of Microsoft Azure Cloud

• Secure – Avoid the public Internet and connect securely from within the InterXion data center to your cloud provider.
• Reliable – Ensure optimal performance with SLA backed connectivity and uptime.
• Fast – High bandwidth, low latency.
• Cost-effective – Reduce costs with a single connection.
• Easy – 1 Gbit/s port is available and an upgrade to max. 10 GbE is possible, activated by a simple request to ASP providing an ExpressRoute activation key with the required bandwith (increments of 50 Mbit/s).
  Activation keys can be ordered by ASP through our CSP Tier 1 Portal.

ExpressRoute gives us a fast and reliable connection to Azure, making it suitable for scenarios like periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery, and other high-availability strategies. It will be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data, such as datasets for high-performance computing applications, or moving large virtual machines between your Dev-Test environment in an Azure virtual private cloud and your on-premises production environment.

Setting up ExpressRoute

ExpressRoute consists out of multiple objects in order to create a connection. On the Azure side a virtual network (VNet) needs to be deployed. A gateway subnet needs to be defined with a virtual network gateway (VNG). Once these items are in place, an ExpressRoute circuit can be created in Azure. Once created, this circuit will have a unique ID. Communicate this unique ID to your provider so they can enable and provision your ExpressRoute circuit.

When you have verified the status in Azure (via the portal or via PowerShell) of your Expressroute circuit (provisioned and enabled), all that is left to do is to set up peering with your on-premise network. When this final step is configured, the ExpressRoute connection is up and running.

Extending your cloud infrastructure with ExpressRoute

ExpressRoute will extend our own public and private cloud infrastructure and we will be able to add compute and storage capacity. With high throughput and fast latencies, Azure will feel like a natural extension to the environment of our customers. Because of this they enjoy the scale and economics of the public cloud without having to compromise on network performance.

Our customers can leverage their access to their preferred SaaS solutions or infrastructure in our data center or Azure.

We can now build hybrid cloud environments with predictable, reliable, and high-throughput connections offered by ExpressRoute, build applications that span on-premise infrastructure and Azure without compromising privacy or performance.

For example, run a corporate intranet application in Azure that authenticates users with an on-premises Active Directory service, and serve all corporate users without traffic ever routing through the public Internet.

Ready to dive into the world of hybrid clouds? Contact your ASP team!