Equinix eyes role as RIM, Apple cache

Equinix has revealed plans to entice BlackBerry maker RIM, Apple and Samsung to create local caches for their mobile content services in Equinix data centres worldwide.

Chief executive officer Steve Smith told iTnews that the data centre giant wanted to attract the "wireless community" to host servers and storage in Equinix facilities.

"We want to try to relieve their backhaul demands," Smith said.

"We want the stuff that's underpinning all the traffic they're pushing around the world."

Smith believed Equinix's reach and network connectivity made it an attractive way for mobile players to reduce the latency of services via local caches.

"We think mobile data is going to become a possible ecosystem for us," Smith said.

Cloud central

The company was also pursuing deals with the major public cloud compute players to host nodes in its global data centre network.

Smith predicted the public cloud market would consolidate to around "10 to 15" major players - and Equinix wanted "as many of their public service nodes" in its centres as it could win.

"We want to be the home for as much of the cloud as we can collect," Smith said.

"We want to entice service providers to get as much of their cloud platforms into our data centres."

Part of the reason it wanted to "collect" cloud infrastructure was to help it attract the business of other enterprises.

Smith said Equinix was building an automated "global portal" that would enable customers to "look inside a data centre" and see the infrastructure assets it could potentially use.

He said he wanted customers to see they were "only a cross-connect away from connecting to a cloud" or carrier network if they were to also host kit within that Equinix centre.

"When a customer comes to our data centre it's going to enable them to look into a global portal and see [for example] there's 62 networks in this data centre, access to EC2 and hosted SharePoint," Smith said.

"We want to create demand by showing them what's inside our data centres."