3 Keys to Simplify and Speed Digital Infrastructure Deployments

So you’ve decided to move your IT infrastructure to a global retail colocation provider to reduce your IT overhead, only to find far more complexity than you expected. You were promised a fast, straightforward and repeatable process, only to be faced with a myriad of choices in power, cooling and physical form-factor requirements that have snowballed into a multi-factor decision-matrix. And once you’ve settled on a configuration that will support the lift-and-shift, what about the future? Will you be able to further consolidate equipment to this location, and will this new deployment scale to meet your workload growth?

3 things to consider when moving to a retail colocation

Every business’s needs are unique, but there are typically three key factors we would advise you to consider when moving into a retail colocation space that will help you simplify and speed your digital infrastructure deployments:

1. Power capacity (current and future)

By far, the biggest gating factor when it comes to digital infrastructure planning and deployment is making absolutely sure that the available power capacity will meet both current and future needs.

You’ll want to go with a solution with known and guaranteed power that:

1. • Allows your digital infrastructure plan to be implemented with confidence.
   • Can scale up to meet new demand within the guaranteed envelope to add additional workloads without needing a design review or moves/changes.
   • Solves the “chicken and egg” problem, where you can design around capacity limitations or pay for additional capacity to support an evolving infrastructure design.
2. Form-factor standardization

A simple but significant concept when considering a retail colocation provider is cabinet form factor and expandability. Anticipating large footprint cabinets is an important consideration for future-proofing infrastructure designs since many IT infrastructure manufacturers are building larger equipment form factors to fit more compute—something that legacy enclosures cannot accommodate. Cabinets in a retail facility that are constrained by physical dimensions and the appropriate spacing for cooling and equipment “maneuvering” needs no longer work.

3. Move-in readiness

Move-in ready means taking decision, design and build cycles out of the critical path without sacrificing security, quality and control. By leveraging a forward-thinking and consistent design, which includes provisions for power and interconnection, your team can focus on deploying infrastructure and getting back to production-ready, quickly.

Equinix Secure Cabinet Express: Security and consistent performance for fast and easy digital infrastructure deployment

When Equinix introduced Equinix Secure Cabinet Express as an interconnection-ready colocation option, we designed it to accommodate the majority of modern IT deployment requirements. An Equinix-owned cabinet, its 1200 mm minimum depth readily accommodates both legacy and new equipment sizing. Each deployment includes redundant power circuits configured to ensure maximum uptime for your infrastructure. And all Express deployments are guaranteed to accommodate at least 5 kVA power capacity and depending on site location, 7kVA and more are standard.

Each Equinix Secure Cabinet is provisioned for direct interconnection and serves as the entry point for secure connections to the expansive Platform Equinix® ecosystem of partners and providers. A secure fiber patch panel acts as a dedicated demarcation point to ensure that you retain total control over how connections are provisioned to your deployment. Private, low-latency connectivity with other customers via Equinix Cross Connects or other interconnection services, such as Equinix Fabric™, Equinix Connect and Equinix Internet Exchange®, provide fast, reliable access to the widest range of partners and services offered across Platform Equinix— with its 237 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) facilities across 65 metros in 27 countries on 5 continents.

Equinix Secure Cabinet Express use cases

Some noteworthy customer use cases illustrate how Equinix Secure Cabinet Express anticipates common challenges faced by teams on-the-ground, tasked to leverage local colocation and private interconnection.

Use case #1: Available and expandable capacity

A new Equinix customer in EMEA needed to migrate its legacy infrastructure into a colocation space with additional power capacity. It was able to migrate directly into its new IBX location with a Secure Cabinet Express form factor that anticipated its needs for additional space, cooling and power.

Use case #2: Consistently reliable standardization

A U.S. customer needed an additional IT infrastructure deployment location but didn’t know when it would get the internal green light. When the approval came through, the customer had to move quickly. Express deployments being ready to go with the power, space and interconnection in place, removed the need for the customer to engage a design cycle or long lead-time build-out and move right away.

Use case #3: Space, cooling and interconnection readiness

Another EMEA customer was under strict time constraints: they needed a digital infrastructure solution in less than a week. They found the space, power and cooling accommodated by a standard Secure Cabinet Express solution. Since Express is interconnection-ready, the customer was able to get back online and connect to all required services, on time and all within one Equinix IBX data center.

In these use cases, direct, secure connectivity to internet access and other services such as Equinix Fabric was accelerated since Equinix Secure Cabinet Express deployments are pre-configured for interconnection. The Secure Cabinet Express standard form factor also meant that our customers only needed to design the infrastructure deployment once, then replicate the same solution seamlessly at other Equinix IBX sites as needed. The customers could simply and quickly onboard digital infrastructure—reducing risk of downtime during the migration and moving to full operations quickly.

By standardizing around our most commonly recommended cabinet deployment configurations, our customers are enjoying the benefits of  immediate global portability, low-latency interconnection, ecosystem access and colocation services that are ready for today’s and tomorrow’s digital infrastructure deployments.

Learn more by reading the Secure Cabinets ebook or data sheet.