Equinix Newsroom

At Equinix, the “who” speaks to our ecosystem, which is part of our DNA. From the early days of the internet, we have been growing it to provide our customers with a neutral place to connect to those they need to.

The “where” refers to our global footprint of data centers, which is the largest across the world. Wherever our customers are looking to deploy, they are likely to find a data center close to their chosen place of business.

As for the “how”, Equinix has been facilitating interconnection for over 20 years. In the past, our traditional colocation model involved selling space within our data centers and providing our customers with services to connect to other parties. Although the model still works, it offers relatively limited agility, considering the time it would take to procure, ship and configure all the necessary hardware.

These days, our customers are demanding for more. They want on-demand services that they pay based on consumption – the basis of our as-a-Service offerings, or more generally, the cloud. To keep up with their needs and the way of the market, we have had to transform our approaches to interconnection and make them more flexible to meet new demands over the years.

Leveraging IT agility to realize full value

To achieve cloud agility within the data center, one must first understand the services that customers typically deploy when they opt for the colocation model. Broadly, these services can be categorized into:

• Interconnection – connectivity to other participants in the ecosystem
• Compute and storage – for application hosting and data storage
• Networking functions – for switching, routing, firewalls and SDWAN

To deliver these functionalities as-a-Service and on-demand, where our customers only pay for what they use, we offer 3 core services––Equinix Fabric™, Equinix Metal and Network Edge––to help them realize Infrastructure as a Service with Equinix.

• Equinix Fabric

Drawing on its heritage in cloud exchange, Equinix Fabric has evolved over the years to have its capabilities extended to connect customers to other ecosystems globally, on-demand and in real time. As Equinix’s vision for the future of interconnection and the foundation for how our digital infrastructure services connect, Equinix Fabric comes integrated with Equinix Metal and Network Edge out of the box.

• Equinix Metal

To put it simply, Equinix Metal is an automated bare metal infrastructure being retrofitted into our core metros worldwide. With Equinix Metal, customers can leverage single-tenanted compute to deploy applications anywhere in a matter of minutes. Together with our recent integration of PureStorage into the Equinix Metal offering, it covers the compute and storage aspects of deployment, all with the look and feel of the cloud.

• Network Edge

Network Edge, our Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi), allows customers to deploy the functionalities they need without any physical hardware. Integrated into Equinix Fabric™, it addresses the networking requirements that our customers typically have within an Equinix facility, namely, routing, switching, firewalls and SDWAN.

Working with Equinix to fast track your journey

Equinix’s interconnection and edge services may be all about flexibility, agility and scale, but being a digital infrastructure company is all about choice.

Businesses looking to manage their own hardware and connectivity can opt for our more traditional colocation services, whereas those that want to be able to consume everything as-a-service without having to step foot in a data center ever again can benefit from our interconnection and edge services. Those with the capabilities to manage infrastructure locally but do not have the hands and feet on the ground in other regions to do so, or those wanting to test a new market can go for a combination of these services.

At the end of the day, our customers can choose the components they need, wherever they need them, to achieve their goals. By offering them the choice, we can enable them to focus on what truly matters as they become their very own version of a digital infrastructure company.

[1] IDC Worldwide ICT Spending Guide Industry and Company Size (June, V2 2021)

*Note: Asia/Pacific excluding Japan