Equinix announced Equinix Data Hub™, designed to help enterprise customers address today’s ever-growing data  management needs. An integral component of an Interconnection Oriented Architecture, Data Hub is a bundled solution consisting of pre-configured colocation and power, combined with cloud-integrated data storage solutions, to enable enterprises to develop large data repositories and dispense, consume and process the data at the edge – close to its source and users.  Building on the company’s experience working with hundreds of customer deployments that leverage Equinix for data needs in proximity to leading public clouds, Equinix is now launching this solution as a pre-packaged offering.

Enterprises today are faced with the overwhelming challenge of managing the onslaught of data brought on by industry shifts such as IoT and Big Data.  According to IDC research, 77% of organizations reported that in the past 12 -24 months they have expanded the number of data types and sources being used and analyzed to make strategic, operational, and tactical decisions*.  As data volumes continue to increase at the edge, it is impractical to rely on existing enterprise networks to move that data to a central processing facility with the required speed and in a cost-effective manner.  Therefore, it is critical for enterprises to re-think their existing IT infrastructure, and develop an IOA, at the edge.  Data Hub, when combined with Performance Hub and Cloud Exchange, provides a valuable suite of components required to implement an IOA strategy.

Highlights / Key Facts

·         Data Hub works in conjunction with Equinix’s Performance Hub solution.  While Performance Hub solves for the deployment of network gear and interconnection inside Equinix data centers, Data Hub enables the deployment of IT gear integrated with Performance Hub.  Data Hub consists of a large footprint of systems which perform data ingestion and analytics while being securely connected over redundant, high-speed connections to Performance Hub.  Performance Hub, in turn, connects the global enterprise network to public and private cloud services. This combination allows Data Hub customers to securely manage huge volumes of data, and receive or deliver real-time insight from it, wherever it resides.

·         Data Hub is the ideal data management solution for several key use cases, including the following:

·         Cloud-integrated tiered storage:  Data Hub provides the data center locations needed to store performance and capacity tiers of data and metadata close to their sources (enterprise offices, Internet, public clouds), in addition to providing private high-bandwidth links to public clouds. This avoids slow, and potentially costly, data movement by locating data repositories close to the data sources.

·         Big data analytics infrastructure: Data Hub and Performance Hub enable private data processing clusters like Hadoop (in Data Hub) for analytics workloads that leverage the scalable, elastic compute power of the public cloud for business intelligence applications.  As an example, a Fortune 100 multi-national retailer recently turned to Equinix and Data Hub to enable Big Data analytics, private cloud access and cloud-attached storage initiatives to gain competitive advantage over online retailers.

·         Data protection and replication: Data Hub implementations within an Equinix metro enable multi-site deployment for data redundancy, allowing data to be synchronously replicated by an enterprise between multiple Equinix IBX data centers within the same metro area.

·         Data Hub is cloud-agnostic and works in alignment with Equinix’s Cloud Exchange.  This enables an enterprise “data lake” to be simultaneously accessible from multiple public and private cloud services all over secure, low latency and cost-effective connections.  This is critical for companies looking for governance, security and control of their data.

·         For all potential use cases and deployment scenarios, Equinix Professional Services (EPS) and Equinix’s vast channel partner resources are available to work with enterprise customers to design the Performance Hub and Data Hub solution that best meets their needs. Equinix has been working closely with its partner community to develop collaborative solutions involving Data Hub.  Partners, such as NetApp, Dell, EMC and Pure Storage are integrating Data Hub into their data storage solutions, and reseller partners such as FusionStorm are also working with Equinix to offer Data Hub to its enterprise customers.  Whether it’s a cloud-integrated, tiered data storage solution, big data analytics, or data replication and data protection, Data Hub provides the infrastructure scale and performance needed today, with growth for tomorrow.

·         Lance Weaver, Vice President, Product Offers and Platform Strategy, Equinix
“Data, and its exponential growth, continues to be an ongoing concern for enterprise IT.  And there is no expectation it will slow down in the near future.  To keep up with this relentless data rise, it is critical for the enterprise to rethink its IT architecture and focus on an interconnection-first strategy.  Data Hub, is the newest solution from Equinix and we are confident that it will provide our enterprise customers with the data management solutions they need today, while providing for growth tomorrow.”

·         Dan Vesset, Group Vice President, Analytics and Information Management, IDC
“With the explosive growth of mobile, social, cloud and big data, an enterprise data center strategy needs to evolve from merely housing servers to becoming the foundation for new data-driven business models.  Equinix, with its global platform of data centers and interconnection-first approach, offers the type of platform needed to create a flexible datacenter environment for innovation – specifically in the realm of data management at the network edge.”

·         Dan Serpico, CEO, FusionStorm

“FusionStorm is focused on designing, automating, and implementing proven IT platforms to our global customers with optimizing performance in mind. Platform Equinix allows for Data Hub key attributes: delivering applications with consistent scale for compute and networking, connecting applications in real time to many data sources, and creating a great experience for end users who need to access these applications from anywhere. This is why we encourage our customers to work with Equinix; to take advantage of Data Hub and all that it delivers.”