Equinix: Building Cloud Connection Points Inside the Data Center
Up to this point, we haven’t talked a lot about Equinix. But what does the world’s largest co-location provider in market share have to do with the deployment of applications at scale?
Equinix matters to our space today because it’s providing enterprises with direct connection points between their servers and cloud service providers. Its Cloud Exchange program provides enterprise data centers with direct routes to the platforms they use — a bit like a content delivery network, but for accessing services rather than the opposite direction, serving content. And its Performance Hub and Data Hub services enable private access to public connectivity and public storage, making Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service, container engines, and analytics available to a variety of industries that would otherwise be barred from using them due to compliance issues.
So if you’re considering infrastructure-as-code, suddenly the bucket for what qualifies as infrastructure becomes a lot fuller with Equinix.
“Equinix was a company that was historically peer-to-peer networking,” explained Equinix’ director of global solutions marketing, Lauren Cooney, in an interview with TNS founder Alex Williams, “where data centers would be the place where all the traffic would come. And they would exchange capacity, and things along those lines.
“Now, what Equinix is really focused on is the digital edge, and interconnection-oriented architecture,” Cooney continued. She described this interconnection-oriented architecture (IOA) as similar to service-oriented architecture (SOA).” Basically, what it allows users to do is create a direct, private connection to the public cloud — to multiple public clouds, inside of our data centers, across 44 different areas in 21 cities.”
Hear more about how Equinix is assembling its softer, more abstract, data center connection strategy in “How Equinix is Architecting the Digital Edge,” the latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded at the last Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara.
How Equinix Is Architecting The Digital Edge
In This Edition:
1:16: Exploring Equinix’s background and Cooney’s role in the organization.
3:57: Interconnection between applications and networks.
5:19: The relation between interconnection and developer platforms like Cloud Foundry.
7:33: Exploring the hardware architecture evolution in the ARM ecosystem and its impact on Equinix.
10:42: The emerging category of cloud computing hardware and the software being built for it.
13:20: Exploring Cloud Foundry and cloud platform evolution for organizations such as Equinix.
Cloud Foundry is a sponsor of The New Stack.
