Equinix xScale data center program for hyperscalers

Equinix provided details on its $3 billion xScale data center program, including projects currently under development in Brazil, France, Japan and other markets. 

Equinix xScale data centers serve the unique core workload deployment needs of a targeted group of hyperscale companies, including the world's largest cloud service providers. With xScale data centers, hyperscale companies can add core deployments to their existing access point footprints at Equinix, enabling their growth on a single platform that can immediately span 63 global metros and offer direct interconnection—within a vibrant set of ecosystems—to their customers and strategic business partners.

"Equinix xScale facilities offer hyperscale companies the unique value of Platform Equinix, including access to business ecosystems, interconnection services and local market knowledge around the world," said Krupal Raval, Managing Director, xScale, Equinix. "Our xScale data centers are engineered to meet the technical, operational, and pricing requirements of hyperscale companies that require large amounts of space and power to support massive scaling across thousands of servers for cloud, big data analytics or storage tasks, with 10, 20, or even 50 megawatts of power, all while meeting Equinix's sustainability commitments."

Regional Highlights/Key Facts:

Asia-Pacific

• Opening of TY12x in Tokyo. On March 1, Equinix opened its first xScale data center in Tokyo, TY12x. Equinix has had early success with TY12x, securing an anchor tenant committed to the full phase one capacity and a significant portion of phase two capacity.  TY12x is Equinix's first xScale data center in Asia. It will provide more than 186,000 square feet (about 17,300 square meters) of colocation space and will support 54 megawatts of power to hyperscale customers all phases are complete. TY12x operates in close proximity to 11 International Business Exchange IBX data centers in Tokyo.
• In addition to TY12x, the OS2x xScale data center in Osaka is currently under development and is expected to open in Q4 2021. Equinix also anticipates developing one additional xScale data center in Japan in the future. The three xScale data centers in Japan are expected to collectively deliver approximately 138 megawatts of power to hyperscale customers in Japan.
• Equinix and GIC complete Joint Venture Agreement in Asia-Pacific. In Q4 2020, Equinix completed the formation of the greater than US$1.0 billion initial joint venture in the form of a limited liability partnership with GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, to develop and operate xScale data centers in Japan. TY12x, OS2x and a planned future xScale data center in Japan are included in this initial joint venture.

EMEA

• Opening of PA9x in Paris. In February 2021, Equinix opened its second xScale data center in Paris named PA9x, which is currently fully leased by a single hyperscale tenant. PA9x is Equinix's second xScale data center in Paris and will provide more than 29,600 square feet (about 2,750 square meters) of colocation space and support 10 megawatts of power to hyperscale customers when complete. PA9x operates as part of a campus with PA2 and PA3 in Saint-Denis, France.

Additional xScale Data Centers in Europe

• Six xScale facilities are currently operating or are under development in Europe. Collectively, these sites will have the capacity to deliver approximately 106 megawatts of power to hyperscale customers in Europe once all are operational. These sites include:
• Paris:  PA8x which opened in Q1 2019 and PA9x which opened in February 2021
• London:  LD11x which opened in February 2021, and LD13x which opened in Q4 2019
• Frankfurt: FR9x which is expected to open in Q4 2021, and FR11x which is expected to open in Q2 2022
• Equinix and GIC Joint Venture Agreement in Europe
• In Q4 2019, Equinix completed the formation of the greater than US$1.0 billion initial joint venture in the form of a limited liability partnership with GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, to develop and operate xScale data centers in Europe. 

Latin America

• SP5x in São Paulo
• In Q3 2021, Equinix plans to open its first xScale data center in Latin America. SP5x is located in São Paulo, Brazil, and is in close proximity to the Equinix SP4 IBX data center. It will be connected by optical fiber to the existing four Equinix São Paulo IBX data centers and will support five megawatts of power to hyperscale customers in its first phase.

https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/124131/Hyperscale-Connectivity-Drives--Billion-in-Data-Center-Projects-by-Equinix-and-JV-Partners/

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AT&T Cybersecurity launches Managed SASE with Fortinet

AT&T launched managed Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) powered by Fortinet.

AT&T SASE with Fortinet is a global managed SASE solution at scale that unifies software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) with essential network security functions of the SASE framework and 24x7 management. 

As the largest SD-WAN Managed Service Provider in North America, and one of the world’s largest Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs), AT&T said it has a unique understanding of what businesses need as they modernize and transform their networks, including the importance of security being a critical component of any business initiative. The inclusion of around-the-clock management helps relieve the burden of deployment and day-to-day support, with Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts acting as an extension to a business’ network and security teams.

AT&T SASE with Fortinet integrates with AT&T Alien Labs Threat Intelligence platform, enabling and unlocking multiple response actions, which provide SOC analysts visibility into network security, allowing them to respond to alarms effectively and efficiently.

“With the convergence of networking and security, organizations are struggling with managing and protecting applications and data accessing the network. AT&T’s heritage in providing integrated business solutions with managed services, and our best-in-class fiber and 5G connectivity solutions, uniquely position us to deliver on the promise of SASE. The solution will provide visibility and management for a more resilient network, making it safer for businesses to adapt and innovate,” states Rupesh Chokshi, VP, AT&T Cybersecurity.

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AWS adds lower cost storage classes

Amazon Web Services introduced new Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone storage classes that reduce storage costs by 47% compared to existing Amazon EFS storage classes, while delivering the same features and benefits. 

One Zone storage classes redundantly store data within a single Availability Zone (AZ) and are ideal for customers who want cost-optimized file storage options for workloads and applications that do not require the level of availability and durability offered by regional Amazon EFS storage classes that redundantly store data across multiple geographically separated AZs. 

AWS said its One Zone storage classes allow customers to achieve a blended storage price of $0.043/GB-month, while also offering higher availability and durability than self-managed file systems. One Zone storage classes provide these lower costs while delivering the same elasticity and scalability benefits of Amazon EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access, as well as features like lifecycle management, and integration with AWS compute services, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. 

All Amazon EFS storage classes are designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) durability. Amazon EFS regional storage classes are designed to provide 99.99% (4 9’s) availability, while One Zone for Amazon EFS is designed to provide 99.9% (3 9’s) availability. For added data protection, Amazon EFS file systems in One Zone storage classes are automatically backed up using AWS Backup, and can be restored to any AZ within a Region, or copied to a different Region. Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes are available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Milan), Europe (Stockholm), South America (Sao Paulo), Africa (Cape Town), Middle East (Bahrain), and all AWS GovCloud (US) regions, with more regions coming soon.

http://aws.amazon.com/efs

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Dell'Oro: Campus switch sales dipped in Q4

The worldwide Campus Switch revenue declined in 4Q 2020, following a short recovery in the prior quarter, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.  The year-over-year revenue decline was broad-based across all regions, except China which continued to grow for the third consecutive quarter.

“Government stimulus around the world, which propelled market recovery in 3Q 2020, continued in the fourth quarter of 2020,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Director at Dell’Oro Group. “However, 4Q 2020 did not benefit from pent-up demand from large enterprises as much as the prior quarter did. On a more positive note, we started to see some sign of recovery in the mid-market,” added Boujelbene.

Additional highlights from the 4Q 2020 Ethernet Switch – Campus Report:

• Despite the market decline, verticals that performed well during the quarter are government and public sector, lower education, financial sector, and manufacturing.
• Industrial Ethernet switches were in high demand exiting the year.
• 5/5.0 Gbps port shipments were up more than 60 percent in 2020, as the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of higher speeds and new technologies.
• Major vendors with revenue share gain for the quarter as well as for the year are H3C, HPE, and Huawei.

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Cyxtera expands its bare metal service to additional data centers

Cyxtera, which operates a footprint of 61 data centers in 29 markets around the world, expanded its Enterprise Bare Metal service to customers in its data center facilities in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Cyxtera Enterprise Bare Metal offers dedicated colocation infrastructure in an on-demand, subscription-based model. In total, Enterprise Bare Metal is now available from 12 markets – Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London in Europe, as well as Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey Metro, Northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Silicon Valley in North America.

“Our Enterprise Bare Metal offering delivers access to digital infrastructure that meets stringent compliance and security requirements in a dynamic fashion to allow our enterprise customers to deploy the capacity they need as their business needs change,” said Randy Rowland, Chief Operating Officer of Cyxtera. “We’re excited to bring this capability to our world-class facilities in Amsterdam and Frankfurt.”

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VMware teams with NVIDIA to deliver an AI-Ready Enterprise platform

VMware is collaborating with NVIDIA to deliver an AI-Ready Enterprise platform that combines the compute virtualization software of VMware vSphere and the innovation of NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite. Updates to the AI-Ready Enterprise platform include:

• NVIDIA has exclusively certified the new VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 release for NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite, a cloud-native collection of optimized AI applications and frameworks, for an end-to-end AI solution;
• vSphere 7 Update 2 introduces support for the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in NVIDIA-Certified SystemsTM. This, with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, enables customers to fold-in an end-to-end AI solution with confidence on their existing enterprise virtualization platform, instead of running AI projects in separate unmanageable IT silos; and,
• Customers are also able to incorporate the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs into their virtual environment and take advantage of features like Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) allowing GPU cycles to be shared across multiple users; vSphere vMotion to provide live migration for non-disruptive operations; and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for automatic initial workload placement to avoid performance bottlenecks.

“NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a software suite optimized, certified and supported on VMware vSphere that enables customers to rapidly deploy, manage and scale AI in production with confidence,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing, NVIDIA. “Through NVIDIA’s collaboration with VMware, IT professionals can now support business teams with the industry’s most trusted AI tools across their hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

• In September 2020, VMware introduced vSphere with Tanzu to deliver Kubernetes.

https://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-Evolves-Developer-and-AI-Ready-Infrastructure-to-Advance-Digital-Business.4ab5538a-c5f6-4ebd-92a2-1dd0beaf972c.html

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Mexico's GigNet picks Tejas Networks for metro optical in Cancun

GigNet, a  digital infrastructure company in Mexico, has selected Tejas Networks' optical networking and broadband access products for a high-capacity fiber optic network expansion in the Cancun region of Mexico.

Tejas Networks will supply its full range of last-mile access products based on GPON/NG-PON fiber broadband technology, ultra-converged packet aggregation products based on MPLS-TP/PTN technology, and terabit-scale optical backbone products based on OTN/DWDM technology, all centrally managed by a universal SDN-ready network management system (NMS).

Mr. Sanjay Nayak, Managing Director and CEO of Tejas Networks said, "We are delighted to partner with GigNet as they increase their robust, flexible and scalable network to profitably deliver premium, SLA-driven services to their customers, using our innovative products. We are excited that they have selected our end-to-end optical and access products, for this prestigious network in Mexico."

http://www.tejasnetworks.com

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Etisalat picks Netcracker Domain Orchestration for 5G Slicing

Etisalat selected Netcracker Domain Orchestration solutions for automation of 5G slicing within a multivendor, cloud-native 5G core environment and across the entire network. 

Netcracker Core Domain Orchestration, based on the cloud-native Netcracker Digital OSS portfolio, combines Service Orchestration and VNF/CNF Orchestration with critical real-time OSS functions, including Active Inventory and Configuration Management as well as Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-driven analytics. The solution orchestrates multivendor 5G core and incorporates new 3GPP slice management functions, including Customer Service Management Function, Network Service Management Function and Network Slice Subnet Management Function. Additionally, Netcracker Edge Domain Orchestration comprises the same components for the edge domain with the addition of MEC application orchestration and management.

“Etisalat is always at the forefront of innovation, and with our 5G technology evolution to incorporate dynamic slicing, we will bring highly differentiated services, experiences and unique business value to our customers,” said Haitham Abdulrazzak, Chief Technology Officer at Etisalat.

“The collaboration with NEC on Netcracker Domain Orchestration further accelerates the automation, agility and new digital experience needed to change how our customers select and activate on-demand 5G services from cloud platforms,” said Khaled Al Suwaidi, Vice President of Fixed and Mobile Core at Etisalat.

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Zayo to acquire Intelligent Fiber Network in Indiana

Zayo Group Holdings agreed to acquire Intelligent Fiber Network (IFN) which provides fiber-based connectivity solutions to over 400 customers, operates a 5,000 route-mile network across multiple markets in Indiana, including Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Columbus, Terre Haute and South Bend.

“IFN brings to Zayo another unique and dense regional fiber network and a dedicated local team that excels in serving its customer base,” said Matt Steinfort, chief financial officer, Zayo. “This team, the additional network assets and the nearly 1,000 incremental on-net buildings will aid our efforts to accelerate growth as we look to capitalize on the enterprise opportunity within our network reach.”

“The combination of IFN and Zayo will enable significantly enhanced reach and value to our customers and our legacy owners,” said Jim Turner, chief executive officer, IFN. “Together, the combined companies will help drive investment and growth in Indiana’s communications infrastructure and advance the ubiquity of high speed connectivity throughout the state.”

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