Is Your Data Center Slowing You Down?

A high-performance colocation data center can provide the scalability, reliability and sustainability that today’s businesses need

Roger Semprini
Is Your Data Center Slowing You Down?

In our rapidly changing digital world, businesses must adopt advanced technologies to avoid falling behind the competition. To make the most of those technologies, they need to increase digital infrastructure capacity quickly and ensure they have a reliable power supply for that infrastructure.

At the same time, businesses must take tangible steps to ensure that increased energy consumption doesn’t derail their sustainability priorities. Doing all this can be challenging, but doing it with legacy on-premises data centers is essentially impossible.

With the right digital infrastructure, businesses can reframe these challenges as opportunities. Colocation services empower companies to move away from private data centers that are inefficient and inflexible. This frees them to focus more on innovating and less on getting the right infrastructure to enable innovation.

What differentiates high-performance colocation data centers?

Not all data centers are equally positioned to help customers achieve the benefits of colocation. There are many commodity data centers that weren’t built with the current digital business landscape in mind. Instead, they were primarily built to take advantage of cheap real estate and energy or to get close to centralized office campuses. These may have been top priorities at the time, but the business world has changed.

True high-performance colocation data centers are different. They offer value across every stage of their lifecycle:

As a result, they can help customers meet their digital priorities today while preparing themselves for whatever tomorrow holds.

AI-ready infrastructure

The emergence of AI has helped highlight the limitations of on-premises data centers. Many businesses have learned how difficult it would be to deploy the high-power compute infrastructure that AI demands inside on-premises data centers—not to mention the advanced cooling systems they’d need to support that hardware. In contrast, leading colocation providers have invested heavily to ensure their data centers can support AI-ready equipment and services.

Low-latency interconnection

Having workloads distributed across many clouds is now the norm for most enterprises. Of course, there are valid reasons a business might choose a hybrid multicloud architecture that incorporates on-premises environments alongside cloud services. The challenge is that they can’t let those on-premises data centers become bottlenecks that degrade network performance.

In a world where cloud applications often create massive volumes of data, legacy architectures that require backhauling that data through a centralized on-premises data center are untenable. The right data center platform can provide a combination of global reach and ecosystem density, thus ensuring low-latency connectivity to multiple cloud providers wherever it’s needed.

Sustainable infrastructure

Businesses recognize the importance of meeting their sustainability commitments, but doing that on their own would be very difficult. As the need to support power-intensive workloads grows, businesses can benefit from working with colocation providers that have invested in both efficiency and sustainability for data centers. That is, they need to work with a partner that can help them use less energy in their data centers and ensure the energy they do use is covered by renewable sources.

Stadler implements future-proof digital infrastructure with help from Equinix

Equinix is well-positioned to help customers get the high-performance capabilities they need to thrive in the current digital landscape. To learn more about what this looks like, let’s consider the story of Stadler, a global manufacturer of custom trains.

Stadler worked with Equinix to consolidate their on-premises data centers spread across Europe into two Equinix IBX® colocation data centers in Zurich, not far from the company’s headquarters in Bussnang, Switzerland. Their goal in working with Equinix was to enable their digital transformation and future-proof their digital infrastructure.

The scalable power and space that Equinix offers helped the company double their hardware infrastructure capacity. The Equinix data centers also host Stadler’s applications, including mission-critical collaboration, management and planning tools from partners like Microsoft and SAP. The network density found in Equinix data centers helps Stadler ensure reliable connectivity to users throughout the world, giving all ~14,500 Stadler employees on-demand access to these applications.

At Stadler, we are going through a digital transformation. The aim of this completely renewed environment is to increase the efficiency of the entire value chain. Partnering with Equinix has given us a future-proof digital infrastructure platform that we can innovate and expand on.” - Michael Hutab, Chief Information Officer, Stadler

Enabling global interconnection with many different stakeholders

Stadler needed connectivity across their manufacturing facilities, with scalable, high-performance networking to move massive volumes of engineering data between the different sites. This is essential to ensure that every Stadler engineer can access the data they need, when and where they need it.

In addition, Stadler needed connectivity with customers, who are increasingly demanding more transparency into the production process. The company needs to be able to accurately inform customers about the status of a particular project at any given time, and that means ensuring reliable connectivity between globally distributed customers and manufacturing sites.

Finally, the company must coordinate with around 2,000 different partners to make sure the right parts arrive at the right location at the right time. That’s why Stadler also needs reliable, high-performance connectivity across all their supply chain partners.

The density of the Equinix partner ecosystem plays an essential role in helping Stadler connect with all their different stakeholders. Because the company had their choice of network service providers, they were able to quickly scale their bandwidth speeds to 10 Gbps, a 10x increase over their previous network infrastructure.

Preparing for the future

Stadler feels that they are well-positioned to meet their future infrastructure requirements.

Also, as the company considers deploying cloud-based manufacturing technologies like AI, IoT and digital twins/augmented reality, they can take advantage of our market-leading portfolio of low-latency cloud on-ramps to ensure the free flow of data that those cloud applications require.

Stadler also has clear sustainability goals and commitments that Equinix can help support. This includes targeting a 20% reduction in emissions and integrating with their supply chain partners to address Scope 3 emissions. They view Equinix as a partner that can help them achieve these goals while also supporting more energy-intensive workloads.

For instance, Equinix has invested heavily in renewable energy, with the goal of reaching 100% renewables coverage globally by 2030. In 2023, more than 235 Equinix data centers had 100% coverage, enabling businesses like Stadler to achieve zero market-based emissions for their data center energy consumption.

We’ve also invested in new energy-efficiency capabilities. Our annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) in 2023 was 1.42, down from our baseline PUE of 1.54 in 2019. This represents an efficiency improvement of about 22%, despite our portfolio growing significantly during that timeframe.

To learn more about the Stadler story, read the full case study.

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Roger Semprini Managing Director, Equinix Switzerland
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