The ways in which enterprises assemble their network infrastructure have been evolving rapidly as the industry-wide shift to the cloud accelerates. This week Equinix offered another piece of its ongoing response to that shift, unveiling a new Data Hub service that lets enterprises store their data next to the clouds they use but keep control over it.
Equinix already has Cloud Exchange, providing connectivity to an ecosystem of cloud providers, as well as Performance Hub, which gets the enterprise WAN into the data center.
This new offering simply bundles the space and power needed to house big data in a pre-configured package and with partners lined up to help with the particular storage technology.
The idea is to let folks put their data as close as possible to the cloud services that use it, while at the same time not ceding control or access to it.
That might be for compliance reasons, it might be to leverage a common data store from multiple cloud providers, it might be simply for data protection or replication, or simply to keep latency as low as possible for things like IOT.
It’s all part of the industry shift toward caring where data actually is on the internet. From low latency trading, to sovereignty issues, to the caching of content at the edge, to small cells, to proximity to renewable energy, the recurring theme in this era of internet infrastructure has been the old real estate saying, ‘location, location, location’. It’s a quite different theme from the prior decade, in which everything was about achieving scale.