Equinix: Data Center Portfolio Review

Equinix is a digital infrastructure company focused on data centers and interconnection.

Redwood City, California-based Equinix aims to help customers scale the launch of their digital products and services. The company serves over 10,000 customers, and they report working with over 260 Fortune “500” companies.

See below to learn all about Equinix’s data center offerings:

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Data center portfolio

• Owns and operates over 240 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in 70 major metros
• Reports 99.9999% uptime
• Deployment with access to data center expertise from certified technology partners
• Cages, cabinets, and other equipment can be customized and configured to meet customer requirements
• Works to meet certification and compliance standards with network reliability, redundancy, and low latency

IBXflex Space

• Non-cage space that offers security, power, cooling, and interconnecting for office and storage needs
• Unit is equipped with safety and security features, including biometric hand readers, solid doors with pin-proxy cards, fire suppression systems, and smoke detection systems

IBX SmartView

• Real-time online access to environment and operating information relevant to customer footprint at the cage and cabinet levels
• Single source of truth across deployments, including globally
• Actionable, proactive insights using configurable reports and alerts

Equinix Infrastructure Services (EIS)

• Support for planning and project managing deployments
• Vetting, management, and consolidation of all requisite vendor partners into a single invoice with a single Equinix point of contact
• Future-proofing that includes flexible solutions capable of accommodating growth and change

Smart hands

• Remote server access, custom installations, and equipment troubleshooting 24/7/365
• On-site assistance to manage business operations and provide technical support
• Physical audit service to provide information on infrastructure assets and cable connectivity
• Customer portal provides order status, invoices, access reports, and account information, with the ability to place new orders and schedule services
• Payment schedules available with prepayment discounts of up to 40% with rollover of unused monthly plan hours

Equinix Metal

• Developer-friendly automated infrastructure
• DevOps automation offers software deployment in minutes
• Optimize cloud costs, increase security, innovate, and access a world of service providers

Equinix Precision Time

• Time synchronization with 50 microsecond accuracy using Equinix-managed GPS antennas, receivers, grandmaster clocks, and time servers
• Addresses industry-specific challenges, including high-frequency financial services trading platforms needing to precisely order transaction sequences, prevent lip-sync errors for online streaming services, and avoid transactional database errors

Network edge

• Modular infrastructure platform with multi-vendor flexibility
• Reduce complexity and costs with increased ease of management with virtual services

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Partners

A commitment to collaboration drives the Equinix partner program, driven by two types of partners:

• Reseller partners: providing end-to-end managed solutions for development, deployment, maintenance, and billing
• Alliance partners: delivering expertise in network optimization and transformation, hybrid and multicloud enablement, and application workload performance

Equinix provides a secure online partner portal known as Partner Central, which offers sales and technical training and sales tracking.

A referral program is also available for partners looking to interconnect with others in the Equinix ecosystem, including:

• Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure
• Oracle
• AWS
• Cisco
• Dell Technologies
• VMware
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Data center use case

Zoom has grown to be the leader in enterprise video communications. 

After experiencing unprecedented growth, Zoom needed a data center partner with the infrastructure to support their evolving needs and uptime demands.

Zoom takes advantage of Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in nine markets worldwide, plus additional data centers used for disaster recovery backup. Zoom also leverages Equinix Internet Exchange to achieve scalable network-peering aggregation and Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric) to set up and scale access to networks, clouds, partners, and customers.

Zoom identifies several key benefits resulting from their strategic partnership with Equinix:

• Establish data center and interconnection operations quickly and easily
• Establish reliable disaster recovery environments
• High-speed virtual connections with low latency
• Reduce network costs with increased scalability
• Maintenance of regulation-compliant voice and data privacy protections

“Equinix makes everything very easy for us because of the consistency across its global platform. For this reason, and its private interconnection solutions, Equinix is by far our largest data center provider,” says Zak Pierce, data center operations manager, Zoom.

User reviews of Equinix data centers

Reviews of Equinix are consistently high, with many user comments indicating a strong customer focus and high-quality services:

• Gartner Peer Insights: 4.3 out of 5
• G2: 4.1 out of 5

“Partnering with Equinix, a world-class co-location and interconnection service provider, was a faster, better, and cheaper strategy for growing the company, expanding our global footprint and better serving our users with greater performance and reliability.” -Nandu Mahadevan, VP of SaaS operations, BMC Software

“Modernizing our financial services infrastructure on Platform Equinix helps me feel confident we’re ready for whatever the future holds. When we look at our road map, whether it’s microservices or cloud-native solutions, we know we can get where we want to go and bring our key partners with us.” -Richard Hannah, CEO, Celero

“Equinix’s innovative interconnection options allow us to eliminate latency for our customers so that they can process more loans more efficiently.” –Ellie Mae’s VP of cloud infrastructure

Industry recognition of Equinix data center

Equinix is receiving a attention within the industry, with several recent notable achievements:

• Ranked on the Fortune “500” for the first time in 2021
• Awarded the Frost & Sullivan 2022 Singapore Data Center Services Company of the Year
• Named the 2022 HPE GreenLake Momentum Partner of the Year
• Ranked No. 6 on the EPA’s “Top 100” list of green power users

In addition, Forrester analysts predict the interconnection of services, branded as Platform Equinix, offers significant benefits:

• 60%-70% cloud connectivity and network traffic cost reduction
• 30% reduction in latency

Equinix in the data center market

Equinix holds an estimated 11% of the co-location data center revenue and ranks first among the 15 largest providers in 2021, according to Statista. 

Digital Realty holds second place with an estimated 7.6% of the market revenue, with China Telecom in third place at 6.1%.

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