To support the ever-increasing demand for fully automated as-a-service infrastructure, Equinix has expanded its Equinix Metal hubs by making its distributed Bare Metal as a Service available in Melbourne and Osaka, joining existing markets across Asia Pacific in Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.
The appetite for market expansion remains strong despite a fluctuating business environment, including market uncertainty and supply chain disruptions. According to the Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey, 72% of Australian businesses plan on expanding into new markets over the next 12 months. Further, almost half of the respondents (49%) said Melbourne is the most common market in Australia to have a presence in, or plans to expand within the next 12 months. A recent study by HSBC also found that 58% of Australian mid-market enterprises — firms with annual turnover of US$10 million to US$500 million — plan to expand offshore in 2023 and enter a new foreign market.
As companies seek to enter new markets, they face challenges in committing to significant technology investment amid the uncertain economic environment. With Equinix Metal, businesses can support expansion while reducing exposure to unnecessary capex and labour costs. They can tap into Equinix’s digital infrastructure globally and leverage DevOps tools to deploy, maintain and scale their applications to create digital advantages through the world's largest interconnected technology ecosystem.
"The launch of Equinix Metal in Melbourne meets the growing need for private low-latency digital infrastructure," says Guy Danskine, Managing Director, Equinix Australia.
"With on-demand and flexible interconnectivity now available in both Sydney and Melbourne, businesses can instantly access dedicated compute capacity at software speed, automating interconnection and the foundational network infrastructure they need to support the transformation of their digital infrastructure.”
Apart from business expansion, another practical application of Bare Metal as a Service is to enhance business resilience for companies. Equinix Metal removes the hardware challenges of physical infrastructure and companies no longer have to worry about building, configuring and running their IT environment. The ability to do all of that using software is a significant advantage and, for geo-redundancy, provides consistent infrastructure across locations.
With the addition of Melbourne and Osaka in the Asia Pacific, Equinix Metal is now available in 25 global metros including the Americas (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, So Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Toronto and Washington, D.C.); in EMEA (Amsterdam, Helsinki, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm); and in Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo).
In recent years, Melbourne has emerged as regional metropolitan for cloud service providers and large-scale enterprises with robust interconnectivity and future-proof hybrid multicloud architecture. According to the Global Interconnection Index 2023 (GXI), a market study recently published by Equinix, as the second-largest economy in Australia, Melbourne is the fastest growing edge metro in the Asia-Pacific with an expected interconnection bandwidth Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 53% from 2020 to 2024. Melbourne has become a magnet for leading cloud and IT service providers like Amazon Web Services, as well as global and local enterprises.
The launch of Equinix Metal in Melbourne complements the existing node in Sydney. These geographically dispersed, highly interconnected nodes will enable businesses to access dedicated infrastructure at software speed, automating low latency interconnection and foundational network infrastructure that supports their businesses in a digitised world.
Equinix Metal enables enterprises to deploy automated, on-demand, interconnected bare metal infrastructure on Platform Equinix. Integrated with native access to Equinix Fabric, users can tap into low latency access to both private and public cloud environments along with thousands of IT and network providers to implement their own customised hybrid multicloud architecture. Private connectivity and dedicated control equips enterprises with flexible cloud autonomy and instantaneous interconnections to public cloud services. Customers can also leverage Equinix Network Edge to quickly add branded virtual network services to their environments when needed.
The newly upgraded Equinix Metal features a new hardware configuration with the latest processors and next generation chips. These upgrades include 3rd Gen AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra and 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators. These solutions are part of Equinix Metal's next generation (Gen3) of server configurations, which are curated for common workloads and are available on demand in minutes. The advanced optimisation of Equinix Metal gives businesses more ways to build and scale “as-a-Service” offerings, modernise their infrastructure, and power hybrid multicloud architectures and cloud native applications.
Through Bare Metal as a Service, businesses can lower barriers of entry when forming partnerships and create new possibilities based on the innate flexibility of Equinix infrastructure and ecosystem. Some of its customers include Akash Network, Catchpoint, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), NS1, Pure Storage, Super League Gaming, Red Hat Quay, and more.
Sustainability and performance-based metrics guide us in determining technology deployment in Equinix Metal to effectively minimise electronic waste and reduce redundancy of underused server capacity through standardisation. Equinix is exploring a transition to liquid cooling with Equinix Metal to further reduce energy consumption and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE).