More than 75% businesses(1) now use two or more public clouds. However, customers have lacked a suitable cloud option that combines on-premises security and control with high performance, data locality, and low overall TCO. For mission-critical applications that rely on low latency and high-performance network bandwidth, the default has been to retain workloads on-premises or perform real-time needs, such as data processing, at branch office or metro locations. Enterprises have often been forced to build out duplicate edge environments that add cost, complexity, and risk.
Today at VMware Explore Europe 2022, VMware and Equinix announced an expanded global partnership to deliver new digital infrastructure and multi-cloud services. Read the press release here. As part of the expanded partnership, we are excited to introduce a new, joint service offering.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal is a new distributed cloud service that delivers a performant, secure, and cost-effective solution for enterprise applications. The solution will enable customers to combine VMware Cloud infrastructure as-a-service with Equinix Metal hardware as-a-service independently. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal will allow customers to quickly and easily deploy a VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) in over 30 of Equinix’s global data centers on Equinix Metal – an interconnection focused Bare Metal as a Service. The service will make it easy and cost effective for customers to connect to a broad range of cloud services and partners, while benefiting from the performance and security of Platform Equinix’s 240+ data centers in an OpEx model – all without worrying about hardware procurement, rack space, power, cooling, capacity planning, upgrades, patches or support.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal is a great option for enterprises that want the flexibility and performance of the Public Cloud, where business requirements prevent moving data or applications to the public cloud. It offers full compatibility and consistency with on-premises and VMware Cloud operational models and policies and zero downtime migration,. This new service will deliver a more performant, secure, and cost-effective cloud option to support enterprise applications. The service will combine VMware Cloud infrastructure as-a-service with Equinix Metal hardware as-a-service to extend customers’ cloud environments into distributed metro locations, satisfy business-critical performance demands at the edge and confidently preserve the integrity of enterprise workloads.
The service will be available in over 30 of the most interconnected global Equinix locations in select countries, connected to all major public clouds and networks, and addressing latency and data residency business needs.
Customers will be able to purchase the software-as-a-service from VMware and the bare metal-as-a-service capacity from Equinix.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal has some unique benefits:
Multi-Cloud Platform with consistent infrastructure & operations
VMware Cloud delivers a consistent infrastructure and operations platform across public clouds, partner clouds, data centers and edge locations. Optimized for both traditional and modern apps, VMware Cloud creates a single platform for all apps in any environment and unifies environments with consistent operations and security. Customers benefit from enterprise reliability, resiliency, and governance without requiring re-work or re-rewriting applications.
Critically, customers benefit from consistent operations management leveraging familiar skills and tools. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal is a unique digital infrastructure cloud service that takes care of all cloud operations, including security, availability, updates, and governance of the entire distributed infrastructure.
Support for broad range of traditional and modern applications
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal provides an infrastructure platform for customers to modernize their existing enterprise applications on and enables them to run their enterprise workloads of today and tomorrow. Customers can run, monitor, and manage their Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines – all on the same infrastructure. With seamless application portability and rich ecosystem technology support, VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal makes it easy for businesses to migrate or extend their operations, while benefiting from the performance and security of an Equinix data center.
Globally available in 30+ metropolitan areas worldwide
One benefit is the lower latency offered by VMware Cloud on Equinix. Equinix data centers are located in top metropolitan areas with dense ecosystems of localized network, cloud and service provider partners. Customers can take advantage of all the benefits of VMware Cloud in 30+ metropolitan areas with additional markets being added regularly. This is essential for applications requiring proximity to data, ML/Inference, video analytics and high performance VDI.
Next Gen Bare Metal Server architecture
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal leverages Equinix Metal – an interconnected bare metal as a service platform, where single tenant, high performance bare metal servers are provisioned within minutes via a click of a button or an API call. No long lead times for hardware procurement, racking and stacking or provisioning. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal comes with multiple server configs featuring the latest Intel Ice Lake processors and AMD EPYC processors and up to 4×25 Gbps NICs to prevent a single point of failure and support data intense workloads.
Low latency access to Public Cloud services
Equinix Fabric is an advanced software-defined interconnection that offers direct connectivity to your workloads running in the Public Cloud via fast low-latency interconnection links such as Azure ExpressRoute, AWS Direct Connect and Google Cloud Interconnect. Equinix Fabric offers improved performance with low-latency private connections running over a Layer 2 network and reduces security threats and attack surface by bypassing the public internet.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal brings together the latest innovations from VMware and Equinix to provide a unique solution for customers to leverage a distributed cloud approach, easily deploy VMware-based clouds in Equinix data centers, connect to a broad range of cloud services and partners, while benefiting from the performance and security of an Equinix data center. Check out this demo to find out more about how it works.
To learn more and to participate in the early access program for VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal, please email your interest to [email protected].
- Source: Bain Survey of CIOs, Bain Capital Research, Aug 2021
