Equinix has introduced Equinix Data Hub, designed to help enterprise customers address today’s ever-growing data management needs. An integral component of an Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA™), Data Hub is a bundled solution consisting of pre-configured colocation and power, combined with cloud-integrated data storage solutions, to enable enterprises to develop large data repositories and dispense, consume and process the data at the edge – close to its source and users. Building on the company’s experience working with hundreds of customer deployments that leverage Equinix for data needs in proximity to leading public clouds, Equinix is now launching this solution as a pre-packaged offering. Data Hub works in conjunction with Equinix’s Performance Hub solution. While Performance Hub solves for the deployment of network gear and interconnection inside Equinix data centers, Data Hub enables the deployment of IT gear integrated with Performance Hub. Data Hub consists of a large footprint of systems which perform data ingestion and analytics while being securely connected over redundant, high-speed connections to Performance Hub. Performance Hub, in turn, connects the global enterprise network to public and private cloud services. This combination allows Data Hub customers to securely manage huge volumes of data, and receive or deliver real-time insight from it, wherever it resides.
Enterprises today are faced with the overwhelming challenge of managing the onslaught of data brought on by industry shifts such as IoT and Big Data. According to IDC research, 77% of organizations reported that in the past 12 -24 months they have expanded the number of data types and sources being used and analyzed to make strategic, operational, and tactical decisions. As data volumes continue to increase at the edge, it is impractical to rely on existing enterprise networks to move that data to a central processing facility with the required speed and in a cost-effective manner. Therefore, it is critical for enterprises to re-think their existing IT infrastructure, and develop an IOA, at the edge. Data Hub, when combined with Performance Hub and Cloud Exchange, provides a valuable suite of components required to implement an IOA strategy.
· Data Hub is the ideal data management solution for several key use cases, including the following:
· Cloud-integrated tiered storage: Data Hub provides the data center locations needed to store performance and capacity tiers of data and metadata close to their sources (enterprise offices, Internet, public clouds), in addition to providing private high-bandwidth links to public clouds. This avoids slow, and potentially costly, data movement by locating data repositories close to the data sources.
· Big data analytics infrastructure: Data Hub and Performance Hub enable private data processing clusters like Hadoop (in Data Hub) for analytics workloads that leverage the scalable, elastic compute power of the public cloud for business intelligence applications. As an example, a Fortune 100 multi-national retailer recently turned to Equinix and Data Hub to enable Big Data analytics, private cloud access and cloud-attached storage initiatives to gain competitive advantage over online retailers.
· Data protection and replication: Data Hub implementations within an Equinix metro enable multi-site deployment for data redundancy, allowing data to be synchronously replicated by an enterprise between multiple Equinix IBX data centers within the same metro area.
· Data Hub is cloud-agnostic and works in alignment with Equinix’s Cloud Exchange. This enables an enterprise “data lake” to be simultaneously accessible from multiple public and private cloud services all over secure, low latency and cost-effective connections. This is critical for companies looking for governance, security and control of their data.
