BDx Data Centers: Managing Physical and Virtual, Private & Public Infrastructure Via a Single Pane of Glass

“With our global operating platform, we will cut costs dramatically to host edge data centers.”

Modern IT operations are undergoing upheaval, brought on by a perfect storm of internal and external forces.  While traditional IT services once ran solely from central data centers designed for client/server architectures or mainframes, there is a move now to hybrid cloud for greater agility and flexibility to meet changing business requirements.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present Big Data Exchange (BDx).

BDx is a content exchange platform with data centers throughout Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore and India. Its unique hybrid cloud, connectivity, and colocation solutions offer unparalleled security and reliability to its global clientele. As a carrier-neutral provider, BDx creates a secure hybrid ecosystem with BDx Care and BDx Armour, connected to clouds and other data centers over a wide choice of carriers using the BDx SoftConnect. Customers manage all pieces using the BDx Single Pane.

BDx provides customers with a level of customization competitors can only offer using expensive IT teams. BDx automation delivers the ability to manage physical racks with the same ease as working in public clouds.

Braham Singh, BDx CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Can you tell us about the journey of your company to date?

Our journey so far has been to bring together the various assets our investors own. Before BDx was formed, one investor was building a data center in Nanjing, and another, HGC, was managing data centers in Hong Kong. All these data centers had to be united. During that process, we’ve learned our true strength lies in taking under-capitalized assets and bringing them up to par. In doing so, we make life easier for data center customers through automation. We can cut costs, reduce energy consumption and raise the value for these assets. Rather than building new hyperscale data centers, which a lot of our associates in the market do, and do well, we target existing, underperforming data centers and refit them to increase their performance and efficiency.

Q. Tell us about your services in brief.

We serve the enterprise B2B customer and hyperscalers. We provide the enterprise customer with management and a protective cocoon for their IT infrastructure that they access with a single click via a single pane portal. We connect their physical assets at our locations, to assets they may have in other data centers. We can connect that ecosystem to public and private clouds with the same ease of operation. At the risk of being repetitive, we connect all of it together and make it one ecosystem that the customer can access with a click with the BDx Single Pane.

For hyperscalers — large cloud providers and SaaS companies — their clouds also reside on physical infrastructure. We want to focus on their edge nodes. Because our strength lies in serving the enterprise customers, going after the edge node helps deliver low latency access to these clouds. The cloud edge node also creates gravity to bring in more enterprise customers.

Q. Do you believe, advanced sub-systems and infrastructures in place will play an important role in providing real-time experience?

We’re banking on advanced sub-systems and infrastructures being in place. I can achieve all the economies of scale I want in bringing together data centers into a cluster, but it won’t amount to much if it doesn’t translate into service for customers. Through the BDx Single Pane, the customer has a choice of multiple carriers to connect to their data residing elsewhere in the BDx cluster or on the cloud or at third-party data centers. Our BDx Global Platform allows us to have a central command across all data centers, which makes life easier for our customers and it makes us more economical than our competitors. We can now plug into data centers worldwide and connect them back into a central command, making it much easier for us to accomplish what our investors require in terms of economies of scale. Our BDx SoftConnect in each data center connects customers to racks or meet-me-rooms. For example, if AT&T wants to serve customers in Hong Kong, customers in our data center can use the Single Pane Portal to use AT&T to connect their racks in Hong Kong to their data residing with AT&T in New York.

Q. How do you maintain a production network with a large distributed system?

Internally, we call it doing a Lakshmi Mittal. Mittal became one of the richest men in the UK by buying inefficiently run steel mills across the globe and putting them together to form an efficient machine. He built a central command, automating mills that became a production machine across time zones managed from a central command. That’s how we plan to maintain our network with large distributed systems. We may not be the number one state-of-the-art builder of large purpose-built hyper-scale data centers for big players, but we are great at taking subpar assets and cutting down their energy consumption, refitting them, redesigning their power, and making life easier for new and existing customers.

Q. Data centers are expected to continue to play a vital role in the ingestion, computation, storage, and management of information. How do you interpret this?

Our enterprise customers’ data resides on physical racks and in the cloud within data centers like BDx. With our global operating platform, we cut costs dramatically to host edge data centers. By doing so, we’ll play a vital role in the storage and management of information. We can host information across a distributed infrastructure.

Also, after this COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve recognized that data centers are as critical as critical gets, when it comes to global infrastructure. Another outcome of this outbreak is that travel will reduce and remain reduced, meaning the customer is even more dependent on IT infrastructure. All this puts a heavy responsibility on our shoulders to deliver the requisite protection to both governments and the private sector in countries where we operate.

Q. Tell us about your cloud solutions and network services.

We manage an ecosystem for our customers that involves private and public cloud and connectivity; however, we don’t offer cloud services, unless a customer needs help setting up his private cloud on our racks.

If a customer wants a connection to a particular cloud service from their racks, we can offer an ecosystem where they can access racks, a private or public cloud. We’ll bring it all together so their data can reside in our data center, we’ll connect them back into the places that they need to be, and we’ll manage it for them. They can choose who they would like to work with based on their individual needs and we support them.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

The BDx Single Pane portal has just come into play. The BDx SoftConnect, which allows carriers to connect into our data center, is also new. These services ensure our place as a 21st century critical facility provider. I’m really excited about offering IP customization and migration services through automated modules so we can manage the customers’ migration to the public or private cloud more efficiently than companies who use operations that rush through the job. I can’t say much about it yet because this gets me excited and I start saying too much. My peeps have me under a gag order.

Q. What are your trajectories for the next five years?

First is to set up the global operating platform, which is an obsession with my team. We want to plug new data centers into the cluster with minimal incremental cost. If we have 20 data centers by 2024 spread across time zones connected back into a central global operating platform and my customers can manage the ecosystem with a click from the single pane, it means we have succeeded.

“We may not be the number one state-of-the-art builder of large purpose-built hyper-scale data centers for big players, but we are great at taking subpar assets and cutting down their energy consumption, refitting them, redesigning their power, and making life easier for existing customers and new customers who come on board.”