Equinix, a global interconnection and data centre company, has announced the completion of its most recent phase in the evolution of Platform Equinix with expanded connectivity options that help enterprises, cloud providers and network providers interconnect their global business at the digital edge.
To meet the ever-growing, on-demand interconnection needs of customers and to strengthen Platform Equinix as a global platform for digital business, Equinix has expanded its connectivity service delivered via Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric) to support connections between all of its 37 ECX Fabric markets located across five continents.
With this expanded interconnection service, available between any two ECX Fabric-enabled markets, customers can now leverage the power of Platform Equinix to privately interconnect clouds, networks and services to global data centres at their digital edge. This new ability to connect businesses globally allows customers to connect to clouds in other regions and directly enables customers for the first time to establish on-demand network connections between the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Additionally, customers can use the expanded ECX Fabric service as a primary connection between Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres or as a complement to their existing networks. This further unlocks the power of the world’s largest ecosystems located at Equinix by helping customers gain access to potentially thousands of new global partners they can interconnect with via ECX Fabric.
The world is digitising at a rapid pace as major macro, technology and regulatory trends are mandating a business shift to the digital edge. For many firms, the impact of this shift is outpacing their ability to digitally transform and compete in an increasingly cloud-first world. A global interconnection platform designed for digital business can accelerate Digital Transformation efforts by helping enterprises and providers reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything.
ECX Fabric is an on-demand, SDN-enabled interconnection service that helps meet these needs by allowing any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other company’s distributed infrastructure, including the world’s largest network service and cloud providers, on Platform Equinix.
To help customers scale their businesses as rapidly as the digital economy requires, the expanded ECX Fabric global connectivity functionality can be used as a primary connection, or as a complement to a customer’s existing MPLS or Ethernet-based network for data centre-to-data centre connections by handling backup connections between metros, seasonal spikes in traffic, offloading lower value network traffic or for short-term projects requiring more bandwidth.
ECX Fabric also enables customers to streamline their access to the world’s largest cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud on Platform Equinix. As Equinix offers direct access to the highest concentration of major cloud provider onramps in the world, ECX Fabric is ideally suited to solve customers’ multi-cloud network connectivity challenges.
ECX Fabric is currently available in 37 metros globally, including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Culpeper, Dallas, Denver, Dublin, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manchester, Melbourne, Miami, Milan, Munich, New York, Osaka, Paris, Perth, São Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw, Washington, DC and Zurich.
To date, more than 1,400 customers currently using ECX Fabric, including leading enterprises, cloud and network service providers, have established more than 14,900 active virtual connections to ECX Fabric.
Access to ECX Fabric is now available through a new self-service portal user interface or API that enables customers to create and manage connections on demand, within or between metros globally.
In addition to the expanded global connectivity functionality and increased traction in the market, ECX Fabric was honoured in December 2018 at the DCD Awards with the 2018 Smart Data Center Award. ECX Fabric received this recognition for having the richest ecosystem and for quickly becoming the de facto global standard for how enterprises and service providers connect to the cloud.
Private connectivity between enterprises, strategic cloud service providers and network services is essential as digital transformation fuels higher demand for localised digital services at the edge. According to Volume 2 of the Global Interconnection Index, a market study published by Equinix, the capacity for private data exchange between enterprises and cloud and network service providers is forecast to grow nearly 10 times faster than public internet traffic by 2021.
Bill Long, Vice President, Interconnection Services, Equinix, said: “Our vision is to evolve Platform Equinix into a global platform that interconnects and integrates global businesses at the digital edge. This capability is critical for the Digital Transformation efforts of many enterprises, cloud providers and network providers today.
“With our expanded ECX Fabric global connectivity functionality our customers can now privately interconnect to key service providers and across their global digital infrastructure anywhere their business needs to be, at anytime, enabling them to reach anyone in the world, on demand, through a single private connection.”
