The Battle for the Edge is Heating Up

Introduction

The war for controlling and governance of the enterprise digital estate is heating up.  This article highlights important aspects of an optimal design strategy for enterprises with significant requirements for interconnecting multiple edge colocations. It is also relevant to those who want to maintain the maximum control of their digital assets in terms of central governance and to maintain data sovereignty over and above entrusting it to one of the public cloud providers.   

In recent articles, Hybrid Cloud Congress Highlights – Part 1, and Part 2, we have highlighted that the edge is going to be the place where many enterprises will need to design in an optimal way for security, governance, and low latency. Equinix, a leading colocation provider and alternative to public cloud vendors, is continuing to enable traditional storage vendors in the space to keep control of their existing customer base. It is succeeding by making it easier and even more transparent to take advantage of the attractive pay-as-you-go model that traditional hyperscalers use to attract their core base.

Equinix Metal on Dell Subscription Service

In April 2022, Equinix announced major expansion to its Equinix Metal line.  The platform allows API-driven capabilities to the most distant edge of the network as well as all the public cloud and colocation facilities and their partners to position customers for truly superior application performance. The announcement is specifically around adding capabilities of the datacenter-as-a-service (DCaaS) by adding familiar Dell products to its offerings on Equinix Metal: Dell PowerStore, Dell VxRail, Dell EMC PowerProtect DDVE.  The data security, management and of course the jewel – low-latency interconnect is provided seamlessly by Equinix.  This Dell-customer focused announcement is adding to a list of other similar solutions from storage vendors like Pure Storage.  Pure’s customer base has been enjoying this level of integration.

Competition for HCI (hyper-converged) infrastructure market

The latest announcements from Equinix for additional Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Storage as-a-service (STaaS) services with Dell is all in the context of the red-hot Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) space.  According to Gartner1, we are in the middle of the industry shift where between 2020 and 2025 40% of all on-premises storage administration and support will be replaced by STaaS. While Equinix cannot compete with players like Pure and Dell on the Enterprise storage hardware, it is using its stellar low-latency fabric backbone that interconnects everyone, including its competition, as an option to customers. It invites these vendors to use its datacenters to provide joint offerings where the customer has the best option for its needs in terms of flexibility, control, and agility while avoiding egress charges of alternative solutions from the likes of AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure and GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

The old guard is taking notice

It is ironic to think of the AWS and Azure as the “old guard” but they in many respects are playing a catch-up game in the effort to capture these same Enterprises and large companies’ business with substantial and demanding requirements around their edge assets. But these giants of public cloud are throwing their full weight behind this fight.  In part two of the series, we will discuss who of the big three public cloud providers has the best strategy to take on competitors like Equinix in the battle for owning central governance and control of the digital edge.