Equinix brings edge to Sydney

Equinix is taking its Australian customers to the edge, providing Network Edge Services via Sydney.

Network Edge Services (NES) provides virtual network services, enabling enterprises to deploy network functions virtualisation from multiple vendors to connect their digital supply chains at Equinix, without a physical data center deployment or hardware requirements.

The Sydney metro availability of Network Edge is the first in Asia Pacific, alongside Singapore, which has also just been announced. NES was launched in the United States and Europe in June.

John Hanahan senior director of interconnections, told Telecom Times: “Customers have been trained by the clouds to consume things as a service and so what we have done here is effectively enabled customers to establish virtual points of presence in our facilities using industry leading network and security branded applications.”

Initial offerings include a Cisco virtual router, Versa SDWan and firewalls from Juniper, Palo Alto and Fortinet among the initial offerings available.

“Customers can select those applications out of our portal or via our APIs, deploy them on Equinix hosted infrastructure and then from there connect in real-time to the various destinations they want,” Hanahan says.

“We will continue to enhance the portfolio of vendors to really enable customers to use the software and hardware vendors their people are trained to use,” Hanahan says. “It’s important for enterprise customers to be able to leverage the same vendors they’re deploying in their branch offices, data centres and even in the cloud.”

Network Edge includes built-in integration to Equinix’s global on-demand, SDN-enabled interconnection service, Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric). The company says by combining Network Edge with ECX Fabric, customers can deploy virtual edge devices and interconnect them to clouds and network providers located in new global markets, extending their reach to new business partners around the world.

Hanahan says Network Edge’s use cases include cloud-to-cloud routing, migrating from one cloud to another, hybrid cloud firewall and branch to cloud SD-Wan.

“In a multicloud arrangement for example you might deploy a virtual router in our facility to be able to connect an application that might be sitting in Amazon Web Services, with the database within Oracle for example.

“Instead of connecting those two over the public internet where the performance might not be consistent and latency might vary, we have the edge presence for both of those customers and can very quickly connect them together via a virtual router the customer places in our facilities.”

Hanahan says one Australian multinational has already done just that, utilising Equinix’s US NES services. NES launched in the US and Europe in June.

“By doing a cloud to cloud application architecture in this fashion they’re able to deliver a much better performance to the end users while taking advantage of the best of breed capabilities of each cloud.”

Hanahan says other use cases include customers extending their reach into new markets to connect to new clouds, using virtual points of presence to enable multicloud connectivity to clouds resident in the another market.

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