Data center operator Equinix has seen great success with its strategy of offering organizations direct, dedicated connections between the public cloud and their own infrastructure. Rackspace is the latest to sign up.
Increasingly there is agreement that the future of enterprise IT, at least for most large organizations, is a hybrid model whereby enterprises leverage not only their existing, legacy infrastructures but also a cloud of all flavors – public and private. At the same time organizations will increasingly move up the stack and not only leverage raw infrastructure, but also embrace platform-level services.
In this hybrid world, there is an important role to play by vendors that help ease the connections between these varying types of infrastructure. Equinix, the global data center operator, has been leveraging its scale and resource-base to offer these sorts of services. Since Equinix already hosts a huge number of enterprise customers, has existing relationships with most of the public cloud vendors and also has the benefit of having massive private networks to use, it can offer compelling solutions.
Equinix has already signed up public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service and is today announcing the addition of Rackspace to the list. This potentially makes even more sense than the other partners since Rackspace itself has, for the past few years, been talking a very strong hybrid cloud story. Rackspace has held itself up as the vendor who can wrap a service layer around not only its own but third party cloud vendors, this sort of direct connection capability plays right into that strategy.
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For Equinix, it further cements their message that they are the strongest interconnection partner. Equinix essentially plays the role of Switzerland between all these other vendors. Additionally, existing Equinix customers will now be able to add Rackspace managed services to their hybrid or multi-cloud deployments. Initially, access will only be available to Microsoft Azure via Rackspace, with the company indicating the possibility of adding additional cloud service providers over time.
Rackspace services will initially be available through the Equinix Cloud Exchange platform in Chicago, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., with future expansion planned for EMEA and Asia Pacific.
This is an important move for both companies.
