Equinix, Inc, the global interconnection and data center company, today announced that it is offering direct and private access to VMware vCloud® AirTM on Platform EquinixTM in major markets across North America andEurope. Access is available either via Equinix Cloud ExchangeTM, the company's cloud interconnection platform, or via Direct Connect, depending on location. These dedicated, private connections reduce network costs and provide higher and more consistent network performance than Internet-based connections for enterprise customers looking to build out their VMware-based hybrid clouds.

By combining the flexibility of public cloud with the control and security of private cloud, hybrid cloud deployments are on the rise within enterprise IT, with an estimated annual growth rate of 45 percent*.  Direct access to vCloud Air inside Equinix provides seamless hybrid cloud enablement forVMware customers by enabling them to easily combine on-premises vSphere investments with the agility of public cloud without the inherent control, latency and security concerns and limitations of the public Internet. The solution is now available via Equinix Cloud Exchange in London, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. International Business ExchangeTM (IBX^®) data centers, and also via Direct Connect in Frankfurt, London, New York,Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

• Direct access to VMware vCloud Air inside Equinix is ideal for customers looking to seamlessly extend their on-premises VMwarevSphere® infrastructure and move workloads to and from vCloud Air in a more secure, reliable and compliant manner. This offering also enables customers to consolidate multiple network siloes into an Equinix IBX data center and directly connect to vCloud Air, enabling a unified and truly hybrid architecture. And, direct access to vCloud Air offers a robust disaster recovery solution for customers.  Customers with aggressive recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements can place critical applications close to vCloud Air for direct instant recovery, or establish a secondary disaster recovery site for vSphere workloads, thus avoiding application downtime.
• Equinix offers the industry's broadest choice in cloud service providers, such as VMware vCloud Air, and offers direct connections to many of these platforms via Equinix Cloud Exchange or Equinix Cross Connects. Equinix Cloud Exchange is an advanced interconnection solution that provides virtualized, private direct connections that bypass the Internet to provide better security and performance with a range of bandwidth options.  It is currently available in 21 markets, globally.

• Mark Adams, Chief Development Officer, Equinix
  "VMware has a strong history and established foothold within the enterprise market, and therefore it is important that we provide direct access to their solution via our Equinix Cloud Exchange as enterprise demand for high-performance, enterprise-grade cloud services continues to grow.  Cloud Exchange was developed with the intent of providing improved performance of cloud-based applications and workloads through high-throughput, low-latency connections and we are thrilled to be able to provide this to VMware customers."
• Allwyn Sequeira, senior vice president and general manager, vCloud Air, VMware 
  "Working with Equinix accelerates the reach of our cloud services, and provides unified and true hybrid cloud enablement solutions for our customers. Through this collaboration, customers can now gain new data center locations for VMware vCloud Air and complementary connection, network, colocation, hosting and managed services to facilitate their hybrid cloud build-out."
• Scott Hanson, technical director, Ardenta (Equinix and vCloud Air customer)
  "A true hybrid cloud solution must be built with performance and availability in mind.  This is vital for customer experience expectations to be met.  The Equinix Cloud Exchange provides high-performance, low-latency connectivity to vCloud Air, which allows Ardenta to deploy any part of the infrastructure either on-premise or in vCloud Air with no impact on the performance or reliability of the platform.  This would simply not be possible by using traditional VPN connectivity.  In addition, the flexibility to offer the customer a low-cost, speedily provisioned virtual-circuit approach is far more appealing to customers than the physical cross connect model that many datacenters