Equinix Launches Network Edge Offering, Enlists Cisco's Help

Equinix on Tuesday rolled out new virtual network services in what it called the “next phase” in the evolution of its interconnected data center platform.

Network Edge services let companies virtually modernize their networks within minutes and “select, configure and connect network and security devices in real time.” Customers don’t need additional equipment or infrastructure to scale their networks at the edge. The new offering integrates with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, the company’s software-defined interconnection service.

John Hanahan, Equinix’s senior director of product management, said a growing number of customers want to connect virtually via a cloud exchange.

Equinix’s John Hanahan

“What we want to be able to do is cater to that increasing market demand, where customers can establish virtual points of presence for the purposes of aggregating their branch traffic to different cloud destinations and SaaS destinations they may have,” Hanahan told Channel Partners.

Cisco, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks and other vendors provide network functions virtualization (NFV) for Network Edge. A Cisco cloud services router and Juniper virtual firewall are two examples of NFVs.

Rohan Grover, director of product management, Cisco SD-WAN, said the new type of architecture Equinix is delivering stems from growing customer use of multicloud applications.

“We believe this is going to become bigger and bigger over the next few months and years,” Grover said.

Cisco’s Rohan Grover

World Wide Technology (WWT) will partner with Equinix to demonstrate Network Edge next week at Cisco Live. WWT CTO Mike Taylor said the new Equinix service allows his company to more quickly build multicloud infrastructures for its customers.

“Our customers’ legacy network designs were built to provide connectivity to their centralized private data centers,” Taylor said. “Today, applications are rapidly moving to the cloud, and those legacy architectures struggle to scale and address the performance demands of their users. The need for a low-latency, interconnected architecture is driving cloud-edge designs that bring end users and business-critical apps closer together, helping them achieve a faster time to market with a network that can match the agility, pace and reach of cloud-native infrastructures.”

Hanahan said Cisco and Equinix share a significant number of partners – WWT is gold certified with Cisco – who view Tuesday’s announcement as an opportunity to upgrade their multicloud and SD-WAN practices. The channel is eager to “punch above their weight class,” according to Hanahan.

“It fits very nicely within Cisco’s branch transformation architecture and really enables channel partners to help advise customers on the new emerging ways to deliver multicloud, hybrid cloud and transform their WAN,” he said.