Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | July 13, 2023
In my last blog in this series, we looked at the present state of 5G. Although it’s still early and it’s impossible to fully comprehend the potential impact of 5G use cases that haven’t been built yet, opportunities to monetize 5G with little additional investment are out there for network service providers (NSPs) who know where to look.
Now, it’s time to look toward the future. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that 5G technology will be revolutionary across many industry use cases, but I’m not sure everyone understands just how revolutionary, and how quickly it will go down. According to Gartner®, “While 10% of CSPs in 2020 provided commercializable 5G services, which could achieve multiregional availability, this number will increase to 60% by 2024”.[i]
With so many recognizing the value of 5G and acting to capitalize on it, NSPs that fail to prepare for future 5G opportunities today are doing themselves and their enterprise customers a serious disservice. Preparing for a 5G future may seem daunting but working with a trusted interconnection partner like Equinix can help make it easier.
5G is so challenging for NSPs and their customers because it is so revolutionary. Mobile radio networks were built with consumer use cases in mind, which means the traffic from those networks is generally dumped straight to the internet. 5G is the first generation of wireless technology capable of supporting enterprise-class business applications, which means it’s also forcing many NSPs to consider alternatives to the public internet to support those applications.
User plane function breakout helps put traffic near the app
In my last article, I mentioned that one of the key steps mobile network operators (MNOs) could take to enable 5G monetization in the short term would be to bypass the public internet by enabling user traffic functions in the data center. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but to prepare themselves for future 5G and multicloud opportunities, they must go further by enabling user plane function (UPF) breakout.
The 5G opportunities of tomorrow will rely on wireless traffic residing as close as possible to business applications, to reduce the distance data must travel and keep latency as low as possible. This is a similar challenge to the one NSPs faced in the past with their wireline networks. To address that challenge, they typically deployed virtual network functions (VNFs) on their own equipment. This helped them get the network capabilities they needed, when and where they needed them, but it also required them to buy colocation capacity and figure out how to interconnect their VNFs with the rest of their digital infrastructure.
Instead, Equinix customers have the option to do UPF breakout with Equinix Metal®, our automated bare-metal-as-a-service offering, or Network Edge virtual network services on Platform Equinix®. Both options provide a simple, cost-effective way to get the edge infrastructure needed to support 5G business applications. Since both offerings are integrated with Equinix Fabric™, they allow NSPs to create secure software-defined interconnection with a rich ecosystem of partners. This streamlines the process of setting up hybrid deployments.
Working with Equinix can help make UPF breakout less daunting. Instead of investing massive amounts of money to create 5G-ready infrastructure everywhere they need it, they can take advantage of more than 235 Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers spread across 65 metros in 27 countries on five continents. This allows them to shift from a potentially debilitating up-front CAPEX investment to an OPEX investment spread over time, making the economics around 5G infrastructure much more manageable.
Support MEC with a wide array of partners
Multiaccess edge compute (MEC) will play a key role in enabling advanced 5G use cases, but first enterprises need a digital infrastructure capable of supporting it. This gets more complicated when they need to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining existing application-level partnerships. To put it simply, NSPs and their enterprise customers need an infrastructure provider that can not only partner with them, but also partner with their partners.
With Equinix Metal, organizations can deploy the physical infrastructure they need to support MEC at software speed, while also supporting capabilities from a diverse array of partners. For instance, Equinix Metal provides support for Google Anthos, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. These are just a few examples of how Equinix interconnection offerings make it easier to collaborate with leading cloud providers to deploy MEC-driven applications.
Provision reliable network slicing in a matter of minutes
Network slicing is another important 5G capability that can help NSPs differentiate their offerings and unlock new business opportunities. On the surface, it sounds simple: slicing up network traffic into different classes of service, so that the most important traffic is optimized for factors such as high throughput, low latency and security. However, NSPs won’t always know exactly what slices their customers will want to send or where they’ll want to send them, making network slice mapping a serious challenge.
Preparing for a 5G future may seem daunting but working with a trusted interconnection partner like Equinix can help make it easier.”
Equinix Fabric offers a quicker, more cost-effective way to map network slices, with no need for cross connects to be set on the fly. With software-defined interconnection, the counterparty that receives the network slice essentially becomes an automated function that NSPs can easily control. This means NSPs can provision network slicing in a matter of minutes, not days, even when they don’t know who the counterparty is going to be. Service automation enabled by Equinix Fabric can be a critical element of an NSP’s multidomain orchestration architecture.
5G use case: Reimagining the live event experience
As part of the MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept showcase, Equinix partnered with Spectrum Enterprise, Adva, and Juniper Networks to create a proof of concept (PoC) for a differentiated live event experience. The PoC showed how event promoters such as minor league sports teams could ingest multiple video feeds into an AI/ML-driven GPU farm that lives in an Equinix facility, and then process those feeds to present fans with custom content on demand.
With the help of network slicing and high-performance MEC, fans can build their own unique experience of the event, looking at different camera angles or following a particular player throughout the game. Event promoters can offer this personalized experience even without access to the on-site data centers that are more common in major league sports venues.
DISH taps Equinix for digital infrastructure services in support of 5G rollout
As DISH looks to build out the first nationwide 5G network in the U.S., they will partner with Equinix to gain access to critical digital infrastructure services in our IBX data centers. This is a great example of how Equinix is equipped to help its NSP partners access the modern digital infrastructure needed to capitalize on 5G—today and into the future.
DISH is taking the lead in delivering on the promise of 5G in the U.S., and our partnership with Equinix will enable us to secure critical interconnections for a nationwide 5G network. With proximity to large population centers, as well as network and cloud density, Equinix is the right partner to connect our cloud-native 5G network.”
- Jeff McSchooler, DISH executive vice president of wireless network operations
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Windows Systems and Network
Article | July 11, 2023
Businesses are depending more and more on information technology to accomplish daily objectives. The viability and profitability of a firm are directly impacted by the necessity of putting the appropriate technological processes in place. The misunderstanding that "the Internet is down" is often associated with poor internet connectivity shows how crucial network maintenance is since troubleshooting should always begin and conclude with a network expert. In actuality, though, that employee will spend time out of their day to "repair the Internet," and the money spent on that time is the result of the company's failure to implement a dependable network monitoring system. The direct financial loss increases with network unreliability.
Because expanding wide area network (WAN) infrastructure and cloud networking have now become a significant component of today's enterprise computing, networks have grown much more virtualized and are no longer restricted to either physical location or hardware. While networks themselves are evolving, there is a growing need for IT network management. As organizations modernize their IT infrastructure, they should think about purchasing a network management system for several reasons.
Creating More Effective, Less Redundant Systems
Every network has to deal with data transfer through significant hubs and the flow of information. In order to avoid slowing down data transfer, not using up more IP addresses in a network scheme than necessary, and avoiding dead loops, networking engineers have had to carefully route networking equipment to end devices over the years. An effective IT management solution can analyze how your network is operating and provide immediate insights into the types of changes you need to make to cut down on redundancy and improve workflow. More productivity and less time spent troubleshooting delayed data transfers result from increased efficiency.
Increasing Firewall Defense
Given that more apps are being utilized for internal and external massive data transfers, every network must have adequate firewalls and access control setup. In addition to screen sharing and remote desktop services, more companies require team meeting software with live video conferencing choices. Programs with these features can be highly vulnerable to hackers and other vulnerabilities; thus, it's crucial that firewalls stop attackers from utilizing the software to access restricted sections of corporate networks. Your network management tools can set up your firewalls and guarantee that only secure network connections and programs are used in critical parts of your system.
The bottom line is that your company network will constantly require security and development, and your underlying network must be quick and dependable to satisfy demands for both workplace productivity and customer experience. Which IT network management system, nevertheless, is best for your company? Effectiveness doesn't require a lot of complexity, and if it works with well-known network providers, there's a good chance the cost will be justified. Rock-solid security will be the most crucial factor, but you should also search for a system that can operate on physical, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Article | October 10, 2023
Rapid IT infrastructure scaling is always challenging. In March 2020, the coronavirus caused a surge in remote workers as organizations switched overwhelmingly to work-from-home policies. Scaling IT infrastructure to support this sudden shift proved to be a struggle for IT teams, resulting in a migration to cloud-based applications and solutions, a rush on hardware that can support a remote environment, and challenges scaling VPNs to support remote worker security. Here are some of the insights and lessons learned from IT professionals.
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Application Infrastructure
Article | June 10, 2022
As your organization scales, inevitably, so too will its infrastructure needs. From physical spaces to personnel, devices to applications, physical security to cybersecurity – all these resources will continue to grow to meet the changing needs of your business operations.
To manage your changing infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle, your organization needs to implement a robust infrastructure lifecycle management program that’s designed to meet your particular business needs.
In particular, IT asset lifecycle management (ITALM) is becoming increasingly important for organizations across industries. As threats to organizations’ cybersecurity become more sophisticated and successful cyberattacks become more common, your business needs (now, more than ever) to implement an infrastructure lifecycle management strategy that emphasizes the security of your IT infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll explain why infrastructure management is important. Then we’ll outline steps your organization can take to design and implement a program and provide you with some of the most important infrastructure lifecycle management best practices for your business.
What Is the Purpose of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management?
No matter the size or industry of your organization, infrastructure lifecycle management is a critical process. The purpose of an infrastructure lifecycle management program is to protect your business and its infrastructure assets against risk.
Today, protecting your organization and its customer data from malicious actors means taking a more active approach to cybersecurity. Simply put, recovering from a cyber attack is more difficult and expensive than protecting yourself from one. If 2020 and 2021 have taught us anything about cybersecurity, it’s that cybercrime is on the rise and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.
As risks to cybersecurity continue to grow in number and in harm, infrastructure lifecycle management and IT asset management are becoming almost unavoidable. In addition to protecting your organization from potential cyberattacks, infrastructure lifecycle management makes for a more efficient enterprise, delivers a better end user experience for consumers, and identifies where your organization needs to expand its infrastructure.
Some of the other benefits that come along with comprehensive infrastructure lifecycle management program include:
More accurate planning;
Centralized and cost-effective procurement;
Streamlined provisioning of technology to users;
More efficient maintenance;
Secure and timely disposal.
A robust infrastructure lifecycle management program helps your organization to keep track of all the assets running on (or attached to) your corporate networks. That allows you to catalog, identify and track these assets wherever they are, physically and digitally.
While this might seem simple enough, infrastructure lifecycle management and particularly ITALM has become more complex as the diversity of IT assets has increased. Today organizations and their IT teams are responsible for managing hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and connected device or IoT assets. As the number of IT assets under management has soared for most organizations in the past decade, a comprehensive and holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management has never been more important.
Generally speaking, there are four major stages of asset lifecycle management. Your organization’s infrastructure lifecycle management program should include specific policies and processes for each of the following steps:
Planning. This is arguably the most important step for businesses and should be conducted prior to purchasing any assets. During this stage, you’ll need to identify what asset types are required and in what number; compile and verify the requirements for each asset; and evaluate those assets to make sure they meet your service needs.
Acquisition and procurement. Use this stage to identify areas for purchase consolidation with the most cost-effective vendors, negotiate warranties and bulk purchases of SaaS and cloud infrastructure assets. This is where lack of insights into actual asset usage can potentially result in overpaying for assets that aren’t really necessary. For this reason, timely and accurate asset data is crucial for effective acquisition and procurement.
Maintenance, upgrades and repair. All assets eventually require maintenance, upgrades and repairs. A holistic approach to infrastructure lifecycle management means tracking these needs and consolidating them into a single platform across all asset types.
Disposal. An outdated or broken asset needs to be disposed of properly, especially if it contains sensitive information. For hardware, assets that are older than a few years are often obsolete, and assets that fall out of warranty are typically no longer worth maintaining. Disposal of cloud infrastructure assets is also critical because data stored in the cloud can stay there forever.
Now that we’ve outlined the purpose and basic stages of infrastructure lifecycle management, it’s time to look at the steps your organization can take to implement it.
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