Equinix Lands NetApp, Carpathia, EMC, GTT For Cloud Exchange

In a flurry of activity this week, the cloud exchange Equinix introduced this past March has brought in a flock of new participants. With the MicroSoft Worldwide Partner Conference underway, most of the announcements of course had to do with Azure.

NetApp and Equinix revealed an expanded private storage offering for Microsoft Azure. Additionally, the two demonstrated a 36% throughput boost when NetApp’s customers were connected to Azure through the cloud exchange versus the use of a VPN over the public internet.

Nor is that the only cloud storage news, as EMC and Equinix also launched a new service. They are bringing together EMC’s private storage and the Azure public cloud also via Equinix’s cloud exchange and are aiming at the enterprise market.

Carpathia and Equinix have put together a hybrid cloud offering called Starter Kit. The idea is to make the Azure public cloud available via Carpathia’s managed platforms over Equinix’s cloud exchange while all the while holding the line on standards like HIPAA, SOX, and GLBA. I’m sure there’s a next step here, you don’t name the first one Starter Kit without a more comprehensive one right behind it.

And another network operator has signed on to Equinix’s cloud exchange. GTT will be using it hook up its multinational enterprise customers to the various clouds. They mention Amazon AWS and Salesforce by name, but I’m sure Azure is somewhere in there too. GTT’s EtherCloud was always aimed at this sort of connectivity service, although I think perhaps when Inteliquent put it together they hoped they might be the exchange itself.  GTT still seems due for another inorganic move in the second half

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter