Edge Bare Metal service’s first APAC deployment was for Solana Foundation’s blockchain efforts, said Lumen
Lumen Technologies has announced the launch of edge services for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. Lumen’s Edge Bare Metal services provide access to the company’s distributed edge network of high-capacity bare-metal cloud servers. Lumen boasts 5 milliseconds (ms) of latency or less over its fiber network, along with a host of security and connectivity features that it says can isolate and protect data.
“Edge Bare Metal is a computing model that uses physical, single-tenant servers deployed across a distributed network of interconnected data centers close to where machines and people interact. By processing data where it is produced and consumed, organizations can shorten the distance data needs to travel between devices and users while reducing bandwidth strain on networks,” said Lumen.
Lumen’s Edge Bare Metal services provide its clients with single-tenancy dedicated servers. Customers can configure servers with the OS, memory and storage they want, tailored to meet specific business needs and performance objectives. Lumen touts Edge Bare Metal services’ ability to be provisioned quickly, and spun up and spun down in “near real-time” to meet fluctuating needs and on-demand scalability.
Lumen’s Edge Bare Metal services debuted in the APAC region first in Japan and Singapore. Lumen said the first deployment took place in conjunction with The Solana Foundation, a nonprofit focused on blockchain validation. The Solana Foundation and Lumen worked with channel partner Inflect to create the program, which provides Solana communities to bare metal services through Lumen worldwide network of data centers.
“Using Lumen’s service, the global blockchain nonprofit can provide high-speed edge computing infrastructure for node operations and developers on its network, supporting its global community of blockchain validators, as well as application programming interface providers and developers,” said Lumen.
Lumen noted that other solutions available to APAC customers include Lumen Edge Private Cloud, a solution that provides pre-built infrastructure for high-performance cloud computing.
The news about Lumen’s APAC expansion comes on the heels of its announcement last week that Lumen will sell its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) business to Colt Technology Services in a transaction valued at $1.8 billion. The deal includes Lumen’s regional terrestrial and subsea networks, data centers and network equipment. Lumen’s outbound CEO, Jeff Storey, said the deal creates shareholder value, while helping the company focus on other strategic opportunities. The companies hope to complete the transaction by the end of 2023, subject to regulatory approvals. Lumen is also still fresh from its $7.5 billion ILEC sale to Brightspeed, a deal first announced in 2021 but only closed in early October.
It was a little more than two years ago that CenturyLink rebranded itself as Lumen. At the time of the rebranding, before even the CenturyLink ILEC divestiture was announced, the company said its global fiber network and capabilities will allow it to focus on four areas: adaptive networking, including hybrid network solutions; edge cloud and “IT agility” for low-latency, high-performance data access; security services, including global threat intelligence and network-based security controls; and communications and collaboration tools.
