In 2020, organizations were faced with sudden large-scale deployments of remote work to provide seamless, secure access to applications, systems and data, increasing demand for digital infrastructure while ensuring business continuity. These factors drove organizations to accelerate digital transformation initiatives regarding DevOps, hybrid multicloud architecture, security and expanding digital infrastructures to the edge.
With such diverse areas of focus, it’s clear that digital transformation efforts can increase IT complexity. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reported that nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated the complexity of their environments were either “more complex than two years ago’’ or “significantly more complex than two years ago” in a recent whitepaper [1].
A common thread for achieving these digital transformation initiatives is incorporating Equinix Metal™ for on-demand, automated bare metal directly integrated with Equinix Fabric™. Equinix Metal is an automated, interconnected, low-latency bare metal-as-a-service, that is available in global locations across Platform Equinix®. With Equinix Metal, organizations can deploy automated single-tenant bare metal servers in minutes, without the cost and complication of a virtualization layer. Integration with Equinix Fabric supports interconnection to customer and partner ecosystems immediately through software-defined interconnection. Equinix Metal customers have solved business challenges associated with the four digital transformation initiatives mentioned above. In this blog we’ll describe use cases for Equinix Metal and highlight specific examples of what businesses achieved with their dynamic hybrid infrastructure.
Get physical infrastructure at software speed. Just add Metal.
Grow your digital business faster with Equinix Metal. Connect with more customers, networks, and clouds than ever, and gain control over cost and performance while avoiding the complexity and overhead of public cloud platforms.
Read More
Use Case #1 – DevOps Automation
DevOps is dependent on automation for faster delivery, greater accuracy, consistency and reliability while increasing the volume of software deliveries. Having the ability to integrate and provision a variety of systems provides a foundation for consistent DevOps practices. Equinix Metal with Equinix Fabric delivers rapid automated infrastructure and network connection provisioning paired with robust, well-documented APIs. Developers can spin up infrastructure and network connections between infrastructure instances or from infrastructure to services providers (cloud and network) in minutes. This is because leveraging physical machines in the same way as virtual machines reduces complexity and enables faster development of new applications. Businesses can quickly deploy open-source Kubernetes or enterprise offerings from Red Hat, VMware and Google Anthos on Equinix Metal to develop and manage standardized, container-driven workloads and automate manual processes.
LogDNA strengthens compliance and runs deployment sites through Kubernetes
LogDNA, a global provider of a centralized SaaS log management solution optimized for Kubernetes and container-based operations, empowers DevOps teams with the tools that they need to develop and debug their applications with ease. As LogDNA rapidly expanded their footprint to 3,000 customers while operating in the public cloud, they recognized the cloud couldn’t keep pace and lacked critical capabilities to meet customer compliance requirements. LogDNA migrated to Equinix Metal to meet their goal of running all deployment sites through Kubernetes, with lower costs and better performance, while strengthening compliance for its customers. Equinix Metal gave LogDNA on-demand, automated interconnected bare metal-as-a-service (BMaaS), providing the power of on-premises data storage with the convenience of public cloud.
Being able to manage everything through the command line makes Equinix Metal feel like cloud software.”- Lee Liu, Co-founder, LogDNA
Use Case #2 – Hybrid Multicloud
Organizations need faster, neutral access to their customers and the networks they participate in—including major cloud platforms and wireless carriers—at a lower cost. Yet, adopting a hybrid multicloud strategy for latency sensitive, critical workloads can be expensive and time-consuming. Equinix Metal delivers secure infrastructure that is proximate to ecosystems and allows for incremental scaling and consumption. Integrating Equinix Metal with Equinix Fabric helps businesses accelerate hybrid multicloud application deployments using secure, dedicated interconnection on Platform Equinix®. Businesses can deploy 100% dedicated servers ready to run their proprietary software in under a minute in global locations. This helps stabilize the costs of adopting a hybrid multicloud strategy that connects a mix of public, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure to support dynamic, containerized workloads, big data processing, cloud migration and portability across multiple solutions while reducing CAPEX.
Dizzion scales to meet significant demand for virtual desktops
Dizzion is a leading provider of high-performance managed Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for global remote workers, delivering virtual desktops and other cloud platforms to customers with HIPAA, PCI-DSS and SOC 2 Type II compliance requirements. After achieving a three-year growth surge of 195%, company leaders began to rethink their cloud strategy, including how to manage the costs for infrastructure necessary to support seasonal customer growth. They turned to Equinix Metal for neutral infrastructure-on-demand that includes rapid public cloud deployment capabilities to implement VMware, or any other tool of choice, across its single-tenant, dedicated global infrastructure. The Equinix interconnected approach helps Dizzion to be more agile, especially when quick spin-up of infrastructure is required.
With Equinix Metal, we have the ability to respond faster to customer needs, delivering near instantly once we get a request.”- Robert Green, CTO & Co-founder, Dizzion
Use Case #3 – Edge Delivery
Organizations are exploring how they can expand/scale their global reach across a unified cloud and edge strategy to take advantage of best-of-breed technology. The goal is to quickly scale without disrupting their current business. For example, modernizing networks to accommodate IoT and 5G technology requires significant compute and storage capacity and the ability to replicate applications/data in proximity to the edge. Equinix Metal places dedicated physical hardware resources closer to users and devices, which lowers latency to/from users on the edge, improving performance, expanding accessibility and providing greater reach than traditional colocation. In addition, Equinix Metal delivers the flexibility of compute and storage-as-a-service with the higher performance of dedicated hardware. This gives businesses focused on scaling SaaS operations global growth support with rapid infrastructure deployments. Customers can reach new markets, increase flexibility and support innovative applications without adding CAPEX.
HUMAN meets demand for low latency and scalability in bot detection
HUMAN (formerly White Ops) is the global leader in bot detection and human verification on the internet, working with companies and industry groups worldwide that are dedicated to preventing malicious activity in advertising. Low latency of 5-milliseconds and the ability to scale up and down for seasonal peaks in traffic were crucial for HUMAN to serve the programmatic ad space’s need for super-fast decision-making. With automated bare metal from Equinix Metal, the HUMAN team was able to take their performance-tuning to another level, enabling them to process more requests per second with fewer, less expensive servers, and achieve the benefits of a colocation environment— with full elasticity.
It’s just mind-blowing what we were able to get out of Equinix Metal: amazing performance and incredibly low latency to our partners, paired with the ability to scale up and down to meet demand.”- Adam Morgenlender, VP of Product, HUMAN
Use Case #4 – Security
The exploitation of system and software vulnerabilities within a cloud service provider’s infrastructure, platforms, or the applications that support multi-tenancy can lead to a failure to maintain separation among tenants. Lack of tenant separation makes it possible for attackers to gain access to one organization’s resources from another organization’s resources. Equinix Metal gives business operations greater control over surface vulnerability and the security benefits of single-tenant infrastructure. With 100% dedicated single-tenancy on Equinix Metal, businesses can isolate sensitive workloads. They can also deploy and customize hardware that places compute and storage resources closer to users for secure data processing without traversing the public internet to other data centers.
NS1 strengthens security and resilience in modern application and networking
NS1 is a leader in modern application and networking with its purpose-built DNS and traffic management platform for the mission-critical applications on the internet. They noticed an alarming ramp-up in malicious activity because of the critical position the platform has in customer stacks, reinforcing the importance of resilience in the NS1 infrastructure. NS1 chose Equinix Metal for its high-performing bare metal servers, advanced networking capabilities and low latency delivery in edge locations. Initially, NS1 leveraged Equinix Metal to build redundancy and help mitigate malicious internet traffic for customers. As their business has grown, NS1 now partners with more than 650 enterprise-level customers in 46 countries.
NS1’s primary need from Equinix Metal has been more flexible infrastructure to support our global platform. Providing on-demand access to fundamental infrastructure is really critical for how a lot of applications are developing, including ours.”- Kris Beevers, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, NS1
These Equinix Metal customers are transforming how they solve business challenges and accelerate growth with a dynamic hybrid infrastructure that includes automated bare metal. Learn more about Equinix Metal solutions and download the Equinix Fabric data sheet.
i Interconnection Amplifies the Value of Bare Metal Deployments, 2020
Subscribe to the Equinix Blog