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Equinix was founded in 1998 on the principles of equality, neutrality, and internet exchange. The Silicon Valley company even derived its name from those principles and has remained a vendor-neutral multi-tenant data center provider ever since.
Equinix is an expansive, secure, and sustainable data center platform. With a network of over 200 data centers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific, the company is still expanding into other areas, including South America and Africa. The company also has its eyes on sustainable data center possibilities for the future, beyond building business ecosystems.
And with a range of data center products and services, industry awards and recognition, use case examples, and reviews from users, it’s worth looking into, so you can decide if it is right for your company’s data center needs:
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Data center portfolio
Equinix offers companies the opportunity to fast-track their digital transformation with a variety of forward-looking data center solutions and services.
IBX Data Centers
Equinix designs its data centers with security and sustainability top of mind. Workers must pass through five security checkpoints, including biometrics, mantraps, and 24/7 manned security stations. And to meet its goal of 100% green energy, the company continues to implement new practices that help reduce its environmental footprint.
Equinix data centers also come equipped with 24/7 multi-component temperature control systems and a full uninterruptible power supply with backup generators for maximum uptime.
Equinix Infrastructure Services (EIS)
Equinix Infrastructure Services combine Equinix’s long-standing data center expertise with the skills of certified technology partners worldwide.
EIS allows companies to source everything they need, including cages, cabinets, power distribution systems, security systems, and cable management equipment. An Equinix team ensures that all equipment performs seamlessly with software deployments, by utilizing the company’s proven migration process that is fast, low risk, and supports high availability.
IBX Smartview
IBX SmartView is a software platform for monitoring data infrastructure. The fully integrated platform provides online access to environmental and operating data in real-time.
IBX Smartview gives you access to insights like trended temperature and humidity data and circuit-specific power draw data. It also provides configurable system alerts and customizable reports in addition to organization-wide permissions and integrated REST and streaming APIs.
Smart Hands
The Smart Hands tech support service Equinix offers provides remote server access, custom installations, and equipment troubleshooting. With simple Customer Portal access, scheduling equipment installation, rack and stack services, cabling services, and logistics support are in reach. Equinix also offers customizable Smart Hands plans that offer discounts based on your organization’s tech support needs.
Platform Equinix
As a large data center platform, Platform Equinix connects organizations with thousands of partners worldwide. It allows companies to integrate networks, storage, and business applications across an orchestrated fabric. Platform Equinix can help you build physical and virtual connections and multicloud architectures on a reliable and secure platform. No matter where in the world your company does business, Platform Equinix can help offer ultra-low latency and high speeds.
Equinix Metal
With Equinix Metal, companies can reach more customers faster through a fully automated and developer-friendly platform and the high-quality equipment. Teams can build enterprise-level infrastructure optimized for specific industry and company needs that is scalable and cost-efficient. And teams can take advantage of automatic digital infrastructure and software deployments to innovate faster and bring security and stability to customers.
Network Edge
When it comes to virtual infrastructure and data storage, Equinix Network Edge helps simplify networks while improving performance at the same time. Data storage has evolved to interconnected flash-memory chips on solid-state drives (SSDs) that can easily be consolidated through Network Edge. It’s ideal for organizations seeking to modernize their networks, migrate and consolidate data centers, enhance multicloud networking abilities, and extend SD-WAN deployments.
Partners
The global digital infrastructure company interconnects organizations in finance, manufacturing, transportation, retail, health care, education, and government across tools and technologies necessary to succeed in today’s digital-first business environment.
Equinix is partnered with nearly 3,000 cloud and IT providers, almost 2,000 network providers, and over 10,000 customers worldwide. Here are a few of their biggest partners:
- AWS
- Cisco
- F5
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- NetApp
- Oracle
- Dell Technologies
- VMware
- HPE GreenLake
Equinix is also helping Nasdaq take steps toward moving its markets to the cloud.
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Use Case
Colony Brands built a tradition of delivering high-level customer experiences, but large amounts of customer data spread across numerous data centers started to become bulky.
The company needed to increase its direct interconnection bandwidth capacity to connect on-premises and cloud systems and gain a more efficient and secure integration with AWS. They also wanted to reduce network consumption and costs and have better reliability, continuity, and recovery processes.
They transformed their legacy systems into a hybrid IT infrastructure. Equinix helped them tether their corporate data center with an IBX data center nearby. And with Platform Equinix, Colony Brands was able to efficiently interconnect on-premises infrastructure with AWS.
The Equinix Performance Hub was used to establish an interconnection hub with more bandwidth and improved performance across their hybrid environment. The organization could seamlessly integrate with on-premises virtual machines with greater reliability and security.
As a result, Colony Brands gained real-time customer-based business intelligence analytics in AWS and reduced their voice and data annual costs by over 50% while increasing throughput to 10 GBps. They also gained an 81% internal rate of return (IRR) through the interconnected AWS and Equinix hybrid IT platform. And their data center warehousing was optimized to boost back-office analytics through proximate data networking.
User Reviews of Equinix Data Centers
In looking at users reviews of Equinix at Gartner Peer Insights and Capterra, it seems that the company offers customers what they need to operate collocations, data centers, and hybrid IT environments with an enterprise-level price tag.
One CIO reports, “The robustness, flexibility, and capacity of the Cloud Exchange service provides my organization a scalable infrastructure for our cloud-first methodology.”
Another says, “Vendor support and pre-sales effort was excellent, enabling rapid implementation.”
Seventy-eight percent of users at Gartner Peer Insights say they would recommend Equinix. Overall, the company earns 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Industry recognition of Equinix
In addition to Equinix’s commitment to sustainability, the company has received numerous awards and recognition for its products, innovation, and company culture. Here are some examples from 2019 to the present:
- EPA Green Power Partner of the Year Award, 2020
- No. 5 on EPA’s National Top 100 list, 2020
- No. 4 on the Top 30 Tech & Telecom list, 2020
- Named a Leader in 2021 IDC MarketScape Report for Worldwide Datacenter Colocation and Interconnection Services, 2021
- Recognized by EPA for Leading Green Power Use, 2019
- SmartKey Wins Security Today’s 2018 New Product of the Year Award
Equinix in the data center market
The fifteen largest colocation data center companies own about half of the market, according to Statista. Equinix held an estimated 11% market share in 2021, making it the number one company in the colocation data center market. Here are the companies in the top 15 and their approximate market share:
- Digital Realty 7.6%
- China Telecom 6.1%
- NTT GDC 4.3%
- China Unicom 4.2%
- China Mobile 2.1%
- CyrusOne 1.9%
- KDDI Telehouse 1.9%
- GDS 1.6%
- Global Switch 1.4%
- 21 Vianet 1.4%
- CoreSite 1.3%
- Cyxtera 1.2%
- Lumen 1.1%
- Flexential 1.1%
Conclusions
Equinix powers the digital leaders, top enterprises, and global service providers. Its data center solutions and an array of interconnected cloud, hybrid, foundational infrastructure, virtual machines, and cybersecurity solutions bring businesses closer to their customers by taking data closer to the edge and tethering it to localized data center locations.
If your company is seeking a higher level of interconnected data storage and capabilities, then Equinix likely has what you need.
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