Josh Snowhorn, the VP and GM of CyrusOne sat in on theCube during Brocade Tech Day to share news about the company and their alignment with Brocade.  CyrusOne is a global mission-critical focused enterprise datacenter that is the largest provider of datacenter services to the oil and gas industry.  The company has chosen Brocade’s MLXe technology to interconnect their facilities that facilitate the industry’s seismic internet exchange platform.

This high-density data network offering changes the nature of data exchange in a metro in the seismic processing world.  Typically, data in these environments has been tape-based and transported to a central facility for processing.  This security measure is due to the value of the massive amounts of data used in simulations and seismic processing.  The industry uses exabyte-scale Cray supercomputing environments that go way beyond your typical university environments, especially in light of the amount of capital invested in these operations.  CyrusOne is changing the way this data moves by offering this exchange of data at no cost to their clients.  Clients have the foundation with CyrusOne services to implement Big Data with space, computing, and fast cross-connect services.  This factor has helped them choose the low cost per port value of the MLXe series, along with the performance specifications they require.

The future of the datacenter as Snowhorn sees it as a gravitation to larger and larger datacenters.  Significant bandwidth concerns will be sorted out and the main focus for the datacenter is energy costs, as purchasing network capacity is not a significant concern.   The datacenter must be recognized as a more virtualized, modular environment, and embrace the ecosystem of orchestration and policy towards the movement to Software Defined Networking.

The company is in pre-IPO and is a business of Cincinnati Bell.  With 500 customers engaged with the company and 21 existing datacenters around the world, the company has big plans and a significant track record of growth to back this up.