MMR (Meet-Me-Room)

What is a Meet-Me-Room (MMR)?

The MMR, or Meet-Me Room, is a key secure area in a data center. It's designed for businesses to connect with multiple service providers. Meet-Me-Rooms lets Internet Service Providers, Cloud service providers, and other tenants hook up so they can transfer data more efficiently.

MMRs usually have cabinets and racks for tenants to put their equipment in, which makes it easy to transfer data quickly. It lets different service providers and organizations in the same data center hook up and exchange data over the Internet.

In data center interconnections, organizations usually use two or more data centers to meet their information processing needs. These data centers need to be connected somehow so they can share resources and exchange data. The most common type of connection is a virtual private network (VPN), along with connection types like access points (POPs) and MMRs (Meet-Me-Rooms).

A Guide to Build a MMR

A standard MMR (Meet-Me-Room) should have several key configurations:

A minimum of 45U cabinets to accommodate equipment from a variety of network providers and carriers.

An efficient cooling system to maintain the proper temperature for equipment operation.

Dual power supply options, including AC and DC power. If the MMR only supports a single power supply option, the design must ensure that there is sufficient space to accommodate additional carrier equipment.

The following factors also need to be taken into account when designing and constructing an interface room:

Carrier Entry: Best practice is to allow carriers to enter the MMR via fiber optic cables laid from the street into a cross-connect room. By using a sink room (sometimes called a splice box), you can connect different carriers to the MMR, ensuring that you can access as many service providers as possible for the data center.

Meet-me Vault: A meet-me vault is a concrete structure that houses the carriers' fiber optic cables into the data center. For large data centers or carrier hotels, multiple vaults may be required to increase redundancy. These vaults are typically buried a few feet underground at the perimeter of the data center to allow access to fiber optic cables.

To reduce connectivity costs, ideally, the vaults should be located as close to the data center facility as possible. In addition, strategically placing multiple vaults can help attract more service providers to the facility. The greater the number of sinks in the data center, the better it is for providing customers with fair pricing for hosting services. With multiple entry points, fiber optic cables can be routed from reinforced underpasses directly into the cross-connect rooms, with each carrier having its own separate access point, thus guaranteeing high-bandwidth connectivity.

Cross Connection Room (CCR): The Cross Connection Room (CCR) is the key area where the network service provider realizes connectivity with its customers. Fiber optic cables run from the CCR to carrier equipment in the MMR or to other parts of the data center. The CCR also serves as the carrier's fiber entry point for its hardware in the meet-me room.

The Advantages of MMR

There are three main reasons why having MMR in the data center is a good idea: control, choice, and cost.

Control: MMR helps data centers keep customers' data safe and make sure they can keep doing business. Security is a big plus since it prevents unauthorized access and provides generators and battery backup systems.

Choice: Efficient MMR management gives customers lots of different ways to connect. For managed service providers, this means juggling the needs of different carriers and making sure each has enough space for cross-connections and communication.

Cost: MMR cuts customers' local loop communication costs and minimizes traffic delivery costs. It also gives users high-bandwidth connections and improves network performance.

What's more, the existence of MMR can promote the development of data centers, provide customers with more flexible connectivity options, and further facilitate the expansion of data centers.