Equinix is proud to be a Diamond sponsor of Oracle Cloud Day 2019, which is focused on exploring new cloud technologies, best practices, and successful use cases. As a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), Equinix collaborates with Oracle to optimize cloud performance for digital business. I am excited to be one of the keynote speakers at the January 30th session in Boston and the February 5th session in Chicago,i and I hope to see you there!
Cloud is growing up
Cloud has gone mainstream. No longer a tactical solution in the experimentation phase, cloud is a core business enabler, providing improved agility and speed to market, faster innovation, scalability, enhanced productivity and cost optimization. Adoption has not been a straight line, however, as most established enterprises – and even many cloud-native startups – have a heterogenous mix of infrastructure approaches ranging from on-premises legacy systems to virtual private clouds to a mix of public and hybrid clouds. Today, more than 80% of companies are running hybrid/multicloud environments with up to five different cloud platforms, according to RightScale.ii
These environments will continue to grow and increase in cloud complexity as organizations seek to modernize their core business applications, accelerate time to market, connect to industry clouds to boost innovation, and move services closer to users, partners and clouds. The race to cloud is not without challenges as organizations face concerns around managing multicloud infrastructure, distributed data, security threats, compliance risks and decreased performance over the public internet. Moreover, the demand for reliable peak performance will continue to grow with the rise of data-hungry applications leveraging artificial intelligence, the internet of things, virtual reality and streaming media.
Hybrid IT, your way
To solve these challenges, many organizations want to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy that offers the best of both worlds – the muscle of on-premises IT with the elasticity of cloud. Communication between tightly integrated system components requires low latency to work well. It’s a challenge that can be solved by putting the processing power of on-premises critical applications and data in close proximity to cloud providers across a globally interconnected exchange of data centers; essentially, putting private infrastructure adjacent to the cloud. Cloud adjacency enables enterprises to interconnect securely to cloud and IT providers, as well as other business partners, directly, lowering latency and networking costs by avoiding MPLS networks and extended dedicated circuits. Additionally, cloud adjacency offers a bridge for enterprises just starting their journey to cloud. Mission critical applications can be moved to the cloud in an incremental, phased approach when they are ready without affecting system performance or integration dependencies.
Benefits of cloud adjacency on Platform Equinix
Moving on-premises infrastructure next to cloud providers is made easy with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™) on Platform Equinix®. ECX Fabric is a software-defined interconnection solution that connects private IT infrastructure to multiple cloud platforms within minutes over high-speed, low-latency virtualized connections. Interconnected across Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers around the world, ECX Fabric also enables direct and secure access to cloud platforms that may not be local to a business’ data center locations, as well as enabling businesses to move data between their own Equinix deployments in different metros. Here are some of the benefits of deploying a cloud adjacent architecture via ECX Fabric on Platform Equinix:
- Multicloud flexibility: Connectivity to over 2,900 cloud and IT service providers on a single interconnection platform ensures that enterprises can easily deploy hybrid and multicloud architectures with their provider of choice. Private interconnection with multiple cloud providers also facilitates on-demand “pay-as-you-go” flexibility without compromising performance, security or compliance requirements.
- Agility with reliable performance: Businesses can quickly connect and scale their cloud connectivity on demand via a single self-service portal or API, a critical requirement as they look to scale their IT operations with the elasticity and scalability of public cloud services. Distance is immaterial as organizations can reach any ECX Fabric participant (cloud, network, SaaS, etc.) with single-digital round-trip latency across a globally interconnected fabric. Fast, consistent and reliable interconnection to cloud services will enable businesses to quickly optimize and innovate for tomorrow. And, IT leaders can also distribute IT resources at the digital edge, closer to users, for improved end-user experience.
- Enhanced security and control: Businesses can enable distributed security closer to the data and applications they are protecting on ECX Fabric by deploying private interconnection, bypassing the public internet. IT leaders are in the driver’s seat and can determine how and where connections occur.
- Shared database optimization: In their journey to cloud, many enterprises have deployed applications into different clouds that often depend on the same databases, resulting in duplication or overuse of common resources. Consolidating these resources by operating databases on high-performance private infrastructure that is adjacent to multiple public clouds, can optimize database performance and costs while leveraging the elasticity and scalability of public cloud infrastructure for applications. The secure, low latency of private interconnection to public clouds makes this an ideal hybrid architecture. High-volume workloads moving large data sets perform faster and more predictable than they would over the public internet.
- Global scalability: Businesses can interconnect with more than 9,800 companies across a single global platform, including more than 1,700 networks and 2,900 cloud and IT service providers. And, 200 Equinix data centers across 52 metros worldwide makes it easy for enterprises to reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything on Platform Equinix.
Equinix International Business Exchange™ World Map
Use cases
All the benefits of Platform Equinix with ECX Fabric enable businesses to develop the kind of digital-ready, distributed IT infrastructures that today’s trends demand. Common use cases include:
- Network Optimization: Businesses can solve latency issues by shortening the distance between users and services. Establishing private interconnection between public clouds and on-premises infrastructures at Equinix, using ECX Fabric and connectivity to an ecosystem of local network service providers, accelerates network optimization and transformation.
- Hybrid/Multicloud: Leveraging hybrid, multicloud architectures within distributed IT infrastructures and quickly accessing vital business ecosystems via ECX Fabric increases scalability and helps drive global digital business.
- Distributed Security: Digital business increases vulnerability points, especially when data is distributed across many different counterparties. Reduce risk and solve compliance challenges by deploying and connecting security services at local end points, where data is being created, rather than routing traffic back to a remote, central location.
- Distributed Data: Digital trade flows are creating global business and data processes involving an increasing mix of customers, partners and employees. Placing data adjacent to cloud providers lowers costs and improves performance by enabling direct access to critical data resources for global users. ECX Fabric enables this benefit to be repeated in various countries and metros around the world.
Cloud adjacency in action: The best of both worlds
To compete in the high-stakes investment management market, a global services firm needed to re-architect its key IT systems for operations and customer data to improve business agility and provide faster service delivery to its customers. The company wanted to move 100% of its applications to the cloud and close all its data centers. By moving to a single cloud provider, the company expected to see better performance between web, app and database tiers, and reduced cost and complexity around API development.
In an earlier phase of its digital transformation journey, the company had migrated its mission critical databases to Oracle Exadata Database Machine. As a result, the company improved performance across 97% of its database queries supporting core operations, reduced batch process times from 6 hours to 40 minutes and significantly reduced outages and fix times. The improvements were so significant that the company felt that its move to Exadata had been well worth the investment.
The next phase of the company’s digital transformation focused on cloud migration. After successfully moving 60% of its workloads to a public cloud provider, the company turned its attention to its remaining business critical applications for operations and customer data systems. However, testing these workloads in the cloud uncovered some limitations around delivering the performance, high-availability and scalability required to meet the company’s goals.
The company was able to overcome these challenges through a hybrid cloud solution based on implementing the latest generation Exadata Database Machine adjacent to their preferred cloud provider at Equinix. Exadata delivered a scalable, high performance database function with the security and compliance benefits of private infrastructure, while the public cloud provider enabled the company to scale its application and webserver functions with significant cost-effectiveness and flexibility compared to its legacy infrastructure. The company leveraged ECX Fabric to connect to industry-specific business partners, managing multiple connections easily through a single portal. With a cloud adjacent architecture, the firm achieved the performance, resiliency and cost optimization it sought for its mission critical workloads and was able to close its legacy datacenters.
Learn more at Oracle Cloud Day events
Whether you are just starting to move workloads to the cloud or have already deployed a hybrid or multicloud infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Day 2019 can help you learn more.
Equinix is the first and the largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Fast Connect partner, that connects the world’s leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the most interconnected data centers. With Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, customers can extend their Oracle IaaS and PaaS solutions to the Oracle Cloud in 30 plus locations across US, EMEA and APAC.
Read the white paper, “Hybrid IT: Why Cloud Adjacency Matters,” to discover a smoother path to a hybrid/multicloud infrastructure that works, and watch the video to see how Equinix and Oracle can help.
[i] Oracle Cloud Day 2019 cities.
[ii] RightScale, RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report.
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