Equinix continues to leverage its substantial investment in building out the global Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric by layering on additional services customers can self-provision.

The recently announced Equinix Network Edge services allow customers to connect and launch virtual network services in minutes, with no additional hardware requirements, the company said. Also known as virtual network functions, such services typically run on regular x86 servers, replacing expensive, specialized hardware with software.

Traditionally, enterprises have had to buy physical appliances like routers, load balancers, and firewalls and paying IT staff to set them up. Through Network Edge, Equinix customers can provision virtual versions of these appliances quickly, offered as services by Equinix partners.

In combination with Cloud Exchange Fabric, the services are especially useful for companies that need such network functionality in places where they don’t have physical hardware. If you host a rack of servers in an Equinix data center in San Jose, California, for example, but need a router in Amsterdam that’s connected to your network, you no longer have to lease space from Equinix in Amsterdam and figure out how to deploy the box there; you can spin up a virtual router that’s hosted in Amsterdam.

Source: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/...cloud-services