エクイニクスメタルが18メトロに拡大、マネージドアプライアンスをデビュー

Equinix Metalは本日、ベアメタルサービスを18の市場に拡大し、DellTechnologiesおよびPureStorageと提携して提供するサービスとして新しいマネージドアプライアンスを発表しました。Equinix Metal today expanded its bare metal service to 18 markets and debuted a new managed appliance as a service offering in partnership with Dell Technologies and Pure Storage.  The bare metal automation technology that Equinix added to its mix via last year’s $335 million acquisition of Packet will eventually reach the entire footprint of Equinix, which currently stands at 63 markets, but probably not for another few years, according to Zachary Smith, managing director of Equinix Metal. The colocation and interconnection market leader manages at least 220 data centers today. The work it’s doing to add Equinix Metal includes supply chain logistics, installations in each of those data centers, and integration with Equinix Fabric, the company’s automated interconnection service, which connects customers to more than 10,000 clouds, networks, and third-party platforms. Equinix Metal is designed to remove the friction and burdens that enterprises confront as they seek to expand services to more markets, meet hybrid cloud objectives, and integrate their framework across multiple cloud-based platforms, Smith explained.  “We’ve designed the platform really in the eye of an automated colocation product, so very foundational and fundamental products that we can give automated and global access to physical infrastructure, but do so with integrated access to our interconnection ecosystem,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “This is kind of moving us up a little bit from interconnect and network ecosystems as a service and colocation product as a service into that hardware and IaaS [infrastructure as a service], bare metal IaaS,” Smith said. Equinix Metal is a foundational bare metal IaaS product that partners like VMware, Google Anthos, or Red Hat can provide runtimes, applications, and other upper layer services upon, he explained.  The new managed appliance as a service offering is another example of the company’s reliance on partners. On this front, Equinix’s strength isn’t derived from offering its customers better servers, for example, so much as it strives to provide its customers with an operating model for using managed equipment from storage and server manufacturers, Smith said.  Equinix Metal customers can now buy appliances through Dell Technologies or Pure Storage and have them delivered across its entire footprint as a service. “I think appliances are cool again. You see this highly integrated software and hardware stack that’s happening with the hardware innovation going on with accelerators and software innovation that is all around us,” Smith said.  All of these advancements frame a new positioning from the company as a digital infrastructure company. “That infrastructure word is super important to us. It’s what we do. We build and we maintain the world’s digital pipes as well as the buildings that house them, and now the computers that run them,” Smith said.  “We’ll continue on that journey. There is tons of work for us to do,” the former Packet CEO and co-founder continued. “I wouldn’t have the scars on my hands from cage nuts, and racking and stacking if it wasn’t something of a passion.”