Big Data Play: Equinix Adds GoGrid To Its Expanding Cloud Exchange

Equinix, one of the largest co-location and data center providers, said Wednesday it has brought another cloud service provider into the Equinix Cloud Exchange, one that adds a substantial big data and analytics component.

GoGrid specializes in offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service that mostly runs open-source database platforms designed for handling large workloads across clustered deployments. It’s the third public cloud integrated into the Equinix Cloud Exchange, joining Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Equinix launched the exchange at the end of April, touting it as a breakthrough in enabling enterprise hybrid cloud solutions.

Becoming part of the Equinix Cloud Exchange will connect GoGrid to an ecosystem of partners looking for the kind of big data solutions the cloud provider excels at, GoGrid COO Mark Worsey told CRN.

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’Many companies that use big data use hybrid cloud solutions,’ Worsey said.

’It’s clear that the ecosystem of partners, from telecommunication partners, Platform-as-a-Service providers, other technology partners in the Equinix cloud system is tremendous,’ Worsey told CRN.

The Equinix partnership ’gives us a simple channel for selling our services to Equinix customers,’ Worsey said.

Chris Sharp, vice president of cloud innovation at Equinix, told CRN that GoGrid’s expertise in delivering advanced infrastructure and database platforms architected for handling large analytic workloads is ’what we saw in them as a core partner.’

’We have customers internal to Equinix looking for ways to do big data analytics. Now they can port data to GoGrid through a 1- or 10-Gigabit port,’ Sharp told CRN.

That type of cross-connectivity between a variety of vendors creating direct access to specialized resources highlights the benefits of the cloud exchange.

Equinix customers might collect large amounts of data for a few days without the need for any computational work on that data set, Sharp explained.

’But then when they need to, they can set up the architecture on GoGrid, port it and crunch it quickly,’ he said.

’The data is only as good as what you do with it, and the quicker you can compute that and get a decision back to the business, there’s a huge advantage to that,’ Sharp told CRN.

Big data capabilities are increasingly in demand with the continued expansion of the Internet of Things and the growing number of endpoints that generate massive volumes of data, Worsey said.

GoGrid’s analytic prowess is achieved through a suite of offerings falling under the concept of Open Data Services, he said.

’Big data is a tough challenge, and the average system administrator or developer would have to think through a daunting set of tasks to build a big data cluster,’ Worsey told CRN.

GoGrid allows for a one-button deployment -- a single click for a customer to spin up a big data solution in the provider’s cloud environment.

’We saw it’s a huge need and a huge opportunity. That’s where we are focusing on our differentiation,’ Worsey told CRN.

GoGrid also has a proprietary solution called Cloud Bridge to privately connect to Equinix’s International Business Exchange data center in Virginia.

’To have GoGrid as an offering within that exchange is a pretty powerful thing,’ Worsey told CRN.

PUBLISHED MAY 28, 2014