Equinix Fabric and ‘Carrier Neutral Facilities’ simplify multi-cloud management and control
BT has announced Connected Cloud Edge. The new enterprise digital transformation solution extends BT’s own network into strategically located data centers, which BT refers to as “Carrier Neutral Facilities,” or CNFs. Services available at launch include multi-cloud routing capabilities, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) and firewalls. BT is launching Connected Cloud Edge at 13 CNFs, and said it will have 30 global locations running by the end of 2022.
“This gives customers access to a wide range of third-party cloud-based applications and services without having to provision individual connections to each of them,” said BT in a statement.
The platform orchestrates cloud services across multi-cloud environments using managed interconnections, said BT. Driving the capability is Equinix’s Fabric. Equinix describes Fabric as “a software-defined interconnection service that allows any business to connect its own distributed infrastructure to any other company’s infrastructure on Platform Equinix across a globally connected network.”
BT calls Connected Cloud Edge “a real game-changer for customers looking to managing the increasing complexity of multi cloud set-ups with different cloud partners and tariffs.”
BT charts its own digital transformation
Connected Cloud Edge emerges even as BT itself continues to undergo its own digital transformation. The company picked Google Cloud earlier this year as a technology partner for those efforts; the companies have a five-year partnership to use Google Cloud infrastructure, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, security and API management to help drive new BT customer experiences and better operational efficiency.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is BT’s partner for cloudification itself. The companies also have a five-year partnership in place. AWS is there to help BT transform legacy infrastructure and internal applications to a new cloud-first architecture designed with modularity and reusability in mind, it said. The objective is to help BT accelerate the pace of innovation while also streamlining operational costs. AWS is specifically focusing on containerization and serverless deployments, driven by BT’s desire to run cloud-native, using a microservices-based architecture.
BT’s modernization relationships with hyperscalers include Oracle, with whom BT hopes to accelerate the rollout of new mobile services. Oracle noted that the solution will enable BT to test and implement 5G services — such as live-streaming and zero-rated 5G content —across its EE mobile network. The converged policy management solution also provides BT with scalable deployment and testing of new services across both 4G and 5G networks, Oracle said.
