Data centre and interconnect provider Equinix, has provided its users with a means to connect virtually and directly to its facilities, as well as new interconnects between these facilities.
Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) Fabric will now connect all of its facilities, giving fast, highly available connections between sites and to users. The International Business Exchange facilities now using these interconnects are the North American centres, EMEA, including Dublin, and also places such as Sao Paolo. The APAC region will see the same capabilities extended in 2018.
The company said the new inter-metro connectivity will leverage the software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities currently built into ECX to enable any customer to connect its own infrastructure across Equinix locations or connect to any other customer on Equinix’s global platform, regardless of location. Users can customise their connectivity to partners, customers and suppliers through an interface that provides all the benefits companies have come to expect from “as-a-service” models. This includes real-time provisioning via a portal or APIs, pay-as-you-go billing increments, and the removal of friction in establishing elastic connectivity between metros.
Efficient interconnects
With the expansion, said Equinix, any user will be able to more efficiently interconnect its global infrastructure and request connections to any of the more than 1,000 participants on ECX Fabric today. This includes some of the world’s largest enterprises (such as Caterpillar, Citi and Walmart), cloud service providers (including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud) and SaaS providers (including Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow, among others). The inter-metro integration unlocks and further extends the global value, simplicity and consistency of connectivity through Platform Equinix, which currently spans 190 IBX data centres in 48 markets and includes more than 9,500 of the world’s leading businesses.
According to Equinix, the benefits to enterprises include the ability to rapidly scale digital business operations globally, by connecting privately and securely to a greater set of business partners and destinations. This includes both cloud service provider on-ramps within a metro or across other metros for the establishment of geo-redundant multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, as well as connections between a customer’s distributed points of presence essential to solving for distributed applications and today’s demanding big data use cases. Equinix said it enables businesses to rapidly scale in an environment that offers unmatched physical security coupled with the digital security benefits of directly connecting to strategic business partners outside of the public Internet.
Provider benefits
There are benefits for providers too, says Equinix, as they will have the ability to easily extend their reach to an expanding global base of enterprise buyers via private connections that provide a more consistent user experience. Network service providers will have the ability to more easily connect to geo-diverse cloud on-ramps in more metros, and to more easily establish network connections to destinations in which they do not yet have a physical presence, increasing their addressable market.
“Until now Equinix has operated data centres that are highly interconnected within their metro areas,” said Eric Hanselman, chief analyst, 451 Research. “Now Equinix is moving to fully interconnect its global platform, enabling companies to directly connect physically or virtually to customers, vendors and partners, and between their own points of presence, from any Equinix facility. This new interconnection opens a range of possibilities for Equinix customers. It also has the potential for Equinix to deliver a greater breadth of services across its newly globally interconnected platform.”
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