The world is digitizing at an amazing pace as businesses shift to operating at the digital edge. The digital edge is anywhere you need to be to locally interconnect to everyone in your supply chain (e.g., employees, partners, customers). It is also where physical and virtual systems meet, and proximate interconnection with clouds, systems, applications, data and things is required to integrate everything that matters to your digital business.
But for many firms, the impact of this shift to the digital edge is outpacing their ability to transform and compete. For companies to re-architect their IT infrastructures to be digital ready, they need to accelerate their ability to solve for latency, complexity, risk and integration.
At Equinix, our customers are leveraging direct and secure, private interconnection using Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™) on Platform Equinix® to solve these challenges. 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. And today, we’re announcing the completion of our ECX Fabric global roll out, which enables ECX Fabric customers in different markets around the world to connect to each other, accelerating interconnection for global business at the digital edge.
Driving global interconnection
Private connectivity between enterprises, strategic cloud service providers and network services is essential as digital transformation fuels higher demand for localized digital services at the edge. Increasing edge traffic is a contributor to the greater global demand for Interconnection Bandwidth.[i] According to the second annual Global Interconnection Index (the GXI), a market study published by Equinix, installed Interconnection Bandwidth capacity is estimated to grow to 8,200+ Terabits per second (Tbps) by 2021-this is the equivalent of 33 Zettabytes (ZB) of data exchange per year-ten times the projected capacity of internet traffic.
To meet the increasing demand for global interconnection and support our customers’ digital business strategies, we have expanded ECX Fabric connectivity services to support direct and secure connections between all of our 37 ECX Fabric markets located across five continents. ECX Fabric is an on-demand, SDN-enabled interconnection service that allows any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other businesses’, including the world’s largest network and cloud service providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle® Cloud and many others.
Said Marc Flood, CIO for the HAVI Group, “ECX Fabric has enabled us to privately connect to clouds that are not where our primary production environment is located. For example, to connect to Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud region in Ashburn, VA, we use ECX Fabric to connect from Chicago to Ashburn in order to transfer multiple terabytes of backup data reliably and cost-effectively every day.”
The new ECX Fabric portal user interface enables customers to easily create and manage connections as needed. This unlocks the power of the multiple digital and industry ecosystems at Equinix by connecting our customers with thousands of new businesses. Our customers can now establish data center-to-data center network connections on demand between any two ECX Fabric markets globally.
Said Rodrigo Silva Simão, IT Director at Agência Estado, “ECX Fabric allows us to easily interconnect our infrastructure in São Paulo and New York. We are impressed with the potential and simplicity of the product. We can manage and scale the solution via the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric Portal and it is implemented in near-real time. In addition, the connection is less expensive, provides a more consistent connection and has about 20% lower latency compared with the dedicated telecom links we use. This latency reduction is essential for us.”
By enabling businesses to more quickly and easily interconnect their infrastructures at the digital edge worldwide, our customers can:
- Quickly connect to dense ecosystems of cloud providers in geographic regions outside of their own data centers, addressing hybrid and multicloud interconnection challenges.
- Create network connections to enable network optimization and act as primary or backup connections between two metros to handle seasonal spikes in traffic, offload lower-value network traffic, or augment short-term projects needing more bandwidth.
- Reliably replicate and back up applications and data between Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers for business continuity and disaster recovery.
“ECX Fabric allows us to provision only the bandwidth we need and allows us to quickly provision additional capacity for long-term or temporary use, without additional contractual agreements. It has also allowed us to eliminate costly point-to-point circuits. The combination resulted in a significant operational cost reduction,” said Troy Heffern, Director of Operations Engineering at WorldAware.
Learn more about these latest enhancements to ECX Fabric.
[i] Interconnection Bandwidth is the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic with a diverse set of counterparties and providers at distributed IT exchange points inside carrier-neutral colocation centers.