Data Centers and the Opportunity at the Edge

When I reached out to today's podcast guest—Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix—about being on the show, I asked if he'd be willing to dig into NaaS or edge data centers.

But as we got to talking before our interview, I quickly realized that these two topics are deeply interrelated. And Jim has lots of insight to share about where the market is headed.

We waded through how Equinix is approaching NaaS from a solutions standpoint and what it means to truly be an edge data center.

Join us for a conversation about NaaS, Equinix’s role in that market as a data center provider, how traditional telcos are positioned to provide NaaS, how Equinix is developing edge services in conjunction with emerging networking solutions, and much more.

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Key Takeaways

• Network as a Service (NaaS) is driven by the demand for cloud-like consumption models for networking. NaaS is seen as an appropriate and desired response to the market changes brought about by the cloud.
• Just as hyperscalers have accustomed users to consuming IT resources on a point-click, there is now a demand for networking to follow suit. While the internet is part of this, operators are looking to incorporate these concepts for their full suite of networking services, including higher-margin, more deterministic services like Ethernet and MPLS. The goal is to move away from the old model of appliances, term contracts, and capex-intensive self-management.
• The concept of "Edge" primarily relates to placing compute and IT infrastructure proximately to users or devices to achieve low latency and deterministic performance. The goal is to ensure deterministic network latency between the end device/user and the application, often targeting improvements over average mobile network latency. Achieving this requires solving the problem across three "pillars": interconnection (automated connectivity between networks/domains), deploying Telco Cloud functions (virtualized network services like those comprising SASE), and MEC (Multi-access Edge Compute), which refers to any compute and storage infrastructure located closer to consumers.
• Automating the interconnection and orchestration of these components is seen as recreating the ease of hyperscale clouds and the internet but for private network infrastructure and private IT infrastructure, where operators seek to make their money. This approach is seen as necessary for new business class services, such as those expected from 5G, which require deterministic performance and a converged infrastructure for both wireless and wireline networks.