The amount of network connections between user devices and data center is growing by the second, driving even greater growth in network capacity between data centers. For a company like Equinix, the world's largest data center landlord, which prides itself on nurturing business ecosystems inside its facilities via network interconnection, this means an ecosystem needs to grow outside of a single facility.

Steven Waszak, CEO and president of the network technology company BTI Systems, says providers of cloud services (a big market for Equinix) need to be in multiple data centers but have them orchestrated and virtualized so a company can see and manage all of their sites in an area as one network. BTI has recently sold a solution that does just that to Equinix, which has deployed it across its data centers in Singapore.

The provider currently has two data centers in the tiny island nation that is a global financial powerhouse but has broken ground on the third one in April. Its facilities in Singapore provide access to the largest internet exchange point in South-East Asia and one of the world's three Global Roaming Exchanges (GRX) – roaming traffic exchanges for mobile data providers, according to Raphael Ho, director of network engineering and operations in Asia Pacific for Equinix.

BTI's Data Center Interconnect solution is a combination of the company's optical and packet-based hardware and its management and control software. The software piece is what makes sense of all the different interconnections and data flows underneath and makes them useful to applications on top through open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

The box that combines optical and packet-based networkign is BTI's 7000 Series. Clients can plug different service modules into the box for different types of functionality, such as WDM, network adaptation, reach extension or Ethernet switching.

The full package also incudes a piece of hardware that enables seamless wavelength upgrades from 10Gbps to 100Gbps. Equinix has not deployed this part of the solution (7800 Series), but does have plans to do so when it adds 100Gbps capabilities.

“BTI offered us an integrated multilayer solution with higher density and more capacity, simplified operations, and a seamless migration path to 100G,” Ho said.

Immediately, however, the solution gave Equinix 96 channels per fiber pair and a single platform for packet-optical layers.

BTI's products are SDN-enabled (SDN for Software-Defined Networking), supporting the OpenFlow protocol, but the Equinix deployment does not leverage this capability, Sally Bament, SVP of global marketing at BTI, said. Primary benefits for Equinix, she said, were visibility and control and better network utilization.

With the BTI platform, Equinix network admins have an easier time steering traffic to support service level agreements with their customers. “They have to accommodate huge amounts of traffic,” Bament said.

Privately held BTI has raised funding from a number of venture capital firms, including BDC, Covington Capital, GrowthWorks and, most recently, Bain Capital Ventures. Bain – the same Bain that was founded by Mitt Romney and a group of partners – joined BTI's US$10m Series C funding round in February.

Bain has two seats on BTI's board of directors, which also includes Tod Nielsen, former VMware COO and key player in the establishment of Pivotal, the big data spin-off owned by EMC, VMware and GE, with former VMware CEO Paul Maritz in the chief executive seat.

Since Q1 of 2011, BTI has raised about $33m to date. Other investors include Export Development Canada, Fujitsu Network Communications and Kodiak Venture Partners.