Equinix Brings the Latest Arm and AI Technology to Bare Metal Platform for Cloud Builders

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Dec. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world's digital infrastructure company™, today announced new technologies for Equinix Metal™ that companies can consume as a service, with the latest from AMD, Ampere, Intel, Nutanix and full-stack accelerated computing from NVIDIA. This expansion of features and availability will give businesses more ways to build and scale as a Service (aaS) offerings, modernize their infrastructure, and power hybrid multicloud architectures and cloud native applications.

Gartner® predicts that "by 2025, 40% of newly procured premises-based compute and storage will be consumed as a service, up from less than 10% in 2021."¹ With six new metros and the latest new hardware options from these leading providers now available on demand with Equinix Metal, customers can gain more raw processing power and throughput than ever before—just a few clicks away and with close proximity to clouds and end users. The new enterprise solutions also give customers on-demand artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid infrastructure, for the rapid building of new digital capabilities.

Developers and IT leaders use Equinix Metal's proven APIs, integrations with popular DevOps tools, and first-class Kubernetes ecosystem to deploy, maintain and scale their applications next to the clouds, users, networks and partners that matter most to their businesses. For example:

• Cybersecurity company HUMAN Security leverages Equinix Metal to get closer to their customers with ultra-low latency networking.
• Super League Gaming, (Nasdaq: SLGG), a global leader in video game experiences and entertainment at the intersection of the creator economy, gameplay content and the metaverse, uses Equinix Metal to deliver real-time content and live video streaming to millions of users around the world.
• Blockchain leader Solana Foundation is able to deliver new nodes on demand to its global end users on the Solana blockchain in minutes with Equinix Metal.

As part of the news today, Equinix is announcing:

• Updated Gen3 Configs with Next Gen Chips from AMD, Ampere and Intel – Equinix Metal will feature a new hardware lineup with the latest processors including 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC™, Ampere Altra and 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators. These solutions, expected to come to market in early 2022, 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.
• NVIDIA AI – In November, NVIDIA announced an expanded collaboration with Equinix to bring the NVIDIA LaunchPad program—which includes instant, short-term access to AI infrastructure—to nine Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers globally, supported in Equinix Metal environments. The LaunchPad program includes curated labs and enables qualified enterprise accounts to test and prototype NVIDIA AI software including NVIDIA AI Enterprise. Enterprises can then deploy and scale AI in Equinix Metal or NVIDIA DGX Foundry, also running at Equinix. 
• Workload Optimized Servers – In addition to its Gen3 line up, Equinix Metal will feature a new line of optimized configurations. These powerful machines give customers a faster way to deploy infrastructure tailored for specialized workloads, such as AI training or in-memory databases, without the long lead times common for special order hardware.
• Hybrid Multicloud on Demand – Equinix Metal is now certified for Nutanix Cloud Platform, enabling complete freedom to run applications on any platform with seamless deployment and improved business agility with a single, unified management plane across bare metal, public cloud and on-premises environments. Equinix and Nutanix are currently enrolling customers in a trial program in preparation for general availability (GA).
• Six Additional Metros – Equinix plans to expand availability of Equinix Metal to six additional metros in 2022 across the Americas (Atlanta and Montreal); EMEA (Helsinki and Stockholm); and Asia-Pacific (Melbourne and Osaka). In addition to offering Bare Metal as a Service in these 24 markets, Equinix also provides interconnection and networking through Equinix Fabric™ and Network Edge, enabling customers to take their applications global in minutes.
• Operating System Partners – Maintainers or experts of Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, NixOS, Talos, Alpine Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux and VyOS will now certify and provide cloud images for Equinix Metal users to consume, enhancing performance, security and multicloud use cases.
• Ecosystem expansion – Equinix has further expanded its ecosystem with fully documented and tested partner solutions from Cycle.io, Era Software, Macrometa, Mist.io, HarperDB and Kubermatic. Explore these and our other partner solutions here.

Quotes

Dan Albert, Executive Director, Solana Foundation
"Equinix is an important provider for the global Solana validator community. In a year where hardware was hard to come by, Equinix's bare metal servers have proven to be more performant than other cloud offerings, and have helped validators and RPC providers scale with the tremendous growth of the Solana ecosystem."

Zac Smith, Managing Director, Equinix Metal
"As the world's digital infrastructure company, Equinix delivers foundational infrastructure across clouds and to the edge, interconnecting them all. When customers combine this foundation with Equinix Metal's on-demand, state-of-the-art silicon and enterprise solutions alongside Equinix's efforts toward its goal of becoming climate-neutral globally by 2030, they no longer have to trade peace of mind for power and performance."

Lynn Comp, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Business, AMD
"The world is demanding ever higher computing power to fuel the technology that impacts all parts of our daily lives, and AMD EPYC processors provide the high-performance compute to meet that demand. We are excited to collaborate with Equinix to deliver end customers an efficient, scalable and compute-intensive capable solution leveraging the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors through our collaboration on their next-gen bare metal offering."

Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer, Ampere Computing
"With demand for data centers expected to double in the next four years, the time is now for a modern and sustainable approach to compute. Ampere is driving this shift from legacy to cloud native processors. We look forward to our continued work with Equinix as they expand their on-demand infrastructure with Ampere® Altra® cloud native processors that deliver higher performance while consuming less power and data center space."

Anurag Handa, VP and GM, Cloud & Enterprise Solutions Group, Intel
"The expanding breadth and rapid pace of today's data center workloads require leading performance and flexibility optimally delivered by Intel's 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. It is the foundation for powering the industry's broadest range of workloads on Equinix Metal, driving new levels of efficiency and scale with advanced built-in acceleration capabilities like security, crypto, and AI."

Thomas Cornely, SVP Product Management, Nutanix
"At Nutanix, our mission is to make managing IT infrastructure so simple that it becomes invisible. Our customers use Nutanix to simplify their hybrid multicloud journey, allowing their workloads to run on the private or public clouds that are best aligned to their needs. By certifying Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix Metal, we are enriching our customers' choices and helping them further unify their Nutanix environments across private and public clouds."

Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA
"Enterprises are eager to adopt AI to develop new industry-specific services that can improve healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, retail and more. NVIDIA LaunchPad makes it easier than ever for businesses to learn how to develop and deploy AI on accelerated infrastructure on Equinix Metal, with the option to continue working on Equinix as they move forward into production."

Additional Resources

• Gartner Predicts 2022: Driving Toward Digital Infrastructure Platforms [analyst report]
• Equinix Makes it Easy for Companies to Run Kubernetes on Bare Metal Everywhere [press release]
• Equinix Metal [website]
• Equinix Metal customer stories [website]
• Equinix Metal partner solutions ecosystem [website]
• Equinix Interactive Sustainability Report (ISR) [website]

About Equinix

Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world's digital infrastructure company, enabling digital leaders to harness a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. Equinix enables today's businesses to access all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to accelerate advantage. With Equinix, they can scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX data centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix products and solutions, unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenues from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; a failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; risks related to our taxation as a REIT; and other risks described from time to time in Equinix filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see recent Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.

¹ Gartner- Predicts 2022: Driving Toward Digital Infrastructure Platforms - Published 21 October 2021 - ID G00757487

SOURCE Equinix, Inc.