By now you have probably heard that purpose-built, physical networking equipment is no longer necessary to run your business. This is great news for enterprises who have been frustrated by the disrupted supply chain for the past two years. But what else can a virtual infrastructure do for your business?
With software-defined edge services you can truly run your operations from anywhere, without purchasing new hardware. Sure, you can run your operations from your headquarters. But also from home, seamlessly. Or even a boat. All you need is an internet connection and a little imagination.
Aside from the clear advantage of running your operations from a sailboat, let’s talk about the ways virtualized infrastructure can give your business a competitive advantage.
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I’ve already mentioned the disrupted supply chain, but the topic is worth delving into a little more. The chip shortage is making it harder to get all kinds of equipment: servers, network gear, everything. New manufacturers are starting to make chips, but it will take time for them to ramp up and meet demand. In sum, we are going to be waiting for a while for the chip shortage to be fixed. If you need to launch a business or product or test a new market – you can’t wait. If you are set on physical networking equipment, you can always transition to your own hardware later on. Or not.
We are guessing that your IT team will never look back once they have experienced managing operations with a virtualized infrastructure. It’s that much easier. They can use Equinix Metal™ automated, bare metal-as-service (BMaaS) and Network Edge virtual networking services to spin up infrastructure anywhere in the world on Platform Equinix® from any Equinix data center. And they can do it all from a keyboard, in minutes, and continue to manage the entire environment from that same keyboard. No travel needed.
Equinix Fabric™ supports private, software-defined interconnection to network devices on Network Edge and Equinix Metal automated bare metal services on-demand, as well as other world-class network and cloud services, through a single console interface. Choose compute and storage resources from Equinix Metal or public cloud providers such as Google and AWS. Select virtual network functions (VNF) devices from partners like Cisco and Versa. Leveraging multiple (one-to-many) virtual connections to all of these services through a single physical port on a private, dedicated connection saves your business money on one-to-one connections.
Network Edge, Equinix Fabric and Equinix IBX Data Center Locations
Proximity to all of your customers and employees – no matter where they are
What does this mean for your business? It gives you the ability to be wherever your customers are, and to respond quickly to changing business needs. It doesn’t matter if your customers are halfway around the globe, virtual edge services let you instantly establish a presence in new markets all over the world. Your team can be spread around the globe as well, and they can all connect to your corporate network over a secure, private network through the closest Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center.
Full access to physical hardware to run your own apps
Some organizations aren’t ready to virtualize, or they have applications that require direct CPU access. In an Equinix data center, you have full access to our Equinix Metal BMaaS, without abstraction. As opposed to standard public cloud offerings, which typically use a shared server model that runs a hypervisor on the physical server and allows multiple customers to run virtual servers on that one physical server, Equinix Metal gives you access to the entire physical server so you can choose whether you want to run a virtual environment or not. You can start with bare metal, turn on your servers, launch your apps, and connect in minutes to a multicloud environment. If you want to virtualize the bare metal services yourself and build out a hypervisor, go for it. You have direct access to the processors and full access to run any application you like, so you can add drive space, memory, whatever you need.
The power of hardware at software speed, at enterprise scale
Equinix APIs will help you automate everything, so you can spend more time enjoying that sailboat. Or stay focused on your business. Build and manage environments from anywhere – we’ve automated the process to make it easier for you. You can use Terraform to create a script that will spin up Equinix Metal servers, Network Edge services, and Equinix Fabric, which connects you to the cloud service provider of your choice. We like to call it the power of hardware at software speed, at enterprise scale.
Don’t take our word for it—give it a try. Visit Developer.Equinix.com and check out our APIs. We provide the documentation and sandbox, playground and production environments you need to experiment and get firsthand experience in how easy it is to set up and manage a virtualized network – from anywhere.
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