Equinix has announced the rebranding and upgrade of its two digital infrastructure services, Equinix Fabric and Network Edge, to respond to increasingly dynamic business needs.

Formerly Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, the digital infrastructure interconnectivity platform is now rebranded as Equinix Fabric to more accurately reflect its current operations.

The platform now allows service providers to use it as a single interconnection approach to connect between all their physical and virtual devices located within Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers, which was previously not done before.

“No longer just about cloud connectivity, Equinix Fabric is now the new standard interconnection approach for digital leaders on Platform Equinix. The product name change we’ve made further signifies the pivotal shift in how the Equinix Fabric capabilities have Evolved,” said Bill Long, Senior Vice President of Core Product Management at Equinix.

This means that enterprises on Equinix Fabric can now directly connect with any other customer or to the world’s major cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud available on Platform Equinix.

“With the pandemic accelerating the pace of digital transformation today, many enterprises are challenged with traditional infrastructure that was not built to meet the demands of a digital business world. Solving these challenges requires a new approach,” said Jennifer Cooke, Research Director, Cloud to Edge Data Center Trends at IDC.

“By deploying their digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix, many enterprises can quickly and easily achieve this today,” she added.

Physical devices located within Equinix data centers, as well as automated bare metal servers available with Equinix Metal, can also be connected with virtual devices like routers, firewalls and SD-WAN gateways available on Network Edge, thus bridging the distance between their distributed digital infrastructure.

Rakesh Inamdar, Senior Director of Core Infrastructure Services at Aon, pointed out that Aon was one of the many enterprises that benefited from Equinix’s upgrade.

With the pandemic creating a massive shift to remote work, Mr. Inamdar said that Equinix Fabric allowed their company to continue remotely without any reduction in services.

“By harnessing the power of the Equinix platform, we were able to bring together and connect our core infrastructure globally, in a highly secure and cost-effective manner,” he continued.

Network Edge expands ecosystem services

Additionally, Network Edge, Equinix’s virtual network function (VNF) services ecosystem, has now made the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect virtual SD-WAN appliance available on their platform.

This means that Network Edge now has a full suite of vendor-neutral SD-WAN services, and companies are now able to deploy VNFs in real-time from multiple vendors, including Cisco, CloudGenix, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and VMware.

“As enterprises advance digital transformation initiatives, a cloud-first WAN architecture is essential to an organization’s overall digital infrastructure and long-term success,” said Fraser Street, the Vice President of Technical Alliances at Silver Peak, which was recently acquired by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Equinix’s Network Edge was adopted on Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect virtual SD-WAN appliances to enable enterprises to scale globally by virtually deploying a secure, digital-ready infrastructure at the edge.

With Equinix Fabric integration, Network Edge customers can also interconnect their virtual edge devices with cloud and network providers located in distributed global markets, extending their reach to up to thousands of new business partners around the world.

Equinix Fabric will enable customers to gain access to network service providers like AT&T, BT, Cloudflare, Colt Technology Services, HKBN and Verizon Business.

“This year has proven what we have long known, which is on-demand networking coupled with a technological ecosystem of like-minded providers is key to powering enterprises’ rapid transformations. By extending our collaboration with Equinix, together we’re giving enterprises greater agility and control over their most critical asset in today’s business landscape – their network,” said Peter Coppens, the Vice President Product Portfolio at Colt Technology Services.

Network Edge is currently available in Singapore and Sydney, and In 2021, Equinix expects to have Network Edge available in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

By Jie Yee Ong, Tech Reporter

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