Equinix and Vodafone announced a plan to build a new subsea hub in Genoa, called GN1, to serve as a strategic interconnection point for the 2Africa cable system.
2Africa is a consortium cable project backed by China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC. At 37,000km long, 2Africa will be one of the world’s largest subsea cable projects and will interconnect Europe (eastward via Egypt), the Middle East (via Saudi Arabia), and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa.
Vodafone is the cable consortium's lead for European landings.
Equinix said GN1 will have a direct fiber connection to ML5, the soon-to-be opened Equinix flagship data center in Milan, and will allow Equinix customers to increase the number of partners they connect with and expand their reach into new markets.
GN1 will offer customers secure, resilient colocation and interconnection services, as well as the ability to directly leverage Equinix's digital ecosystems and colocation facilities in Milan. It will provide a capacity of 150 cabinet equivalents, and colocation space of approximately 6,000 square feet (560 square meters).
Eugene Bergen Henegouwen, President, EMEA, Equinix, states: "I am thrilled we are adding a new metro to our EMEA portfolio. Equinix's Genoa site provides a great landing hub for subsea cable operators, whilst at the same time boosting the digital ecosystems at our recently announced Milan flagship, ML5. Equinix continues to focus on expanding its position as a global connectivity service provider. Our commitment is always to support the increasing demands we're seeing from companies globally to accelerate their digital transformation. We're helping businesses connect to everything they need to succeed, and will continue to do so."
Equinix builds flagship data center in Milan
Equinix is building a new state-of-the-art colocation data center in Milan, Italy.
Known as ML5 and due to open in Q1 2021, the International Business Exchange (IBX) data center will host advanced interconnection services, including Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric) and Equinix Internet Exchange.
The facility is situated in North-West Milan, which will provide customers with direct access to Equinix's industry-leading software-defined networking service, ECX Fabric, enabling virtual interconnections to some of the largest cloud providers in the world, such as: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud.
The $51 million first phase of ML5 is expected to provide a capacity of 500 cabinet equivalents and colocation space of approximately 15,000 square feet (1,400 square meters). Upon completion of the planned future phases, ML5 is expected to provide total capacity of more than 1,450 cabinet equivalents and colocation space of more than 45,000 square feet (4,200 square meters).
The ML5 IBX is the fourth data center for Equinix in Italy.
