Transforming Network Infrastructure Week in Review: Equinix, Infinera, Juniper
By M&A was the name of the game this week in Transforming Network Infrastructure.
On Wednesday Transforming Network Infrastructure offered intelligence about the move by Equinix to buy data centers from Verizon. We also got news that Juniper Networks is acquiring AppFormix.
The $3.6 billion deal with Verizon provides Equinix with 29 new data centers serving 900 customers. So, following the deal, Equinix will have 175 data centers in 43 markets.
The move by Verizon, which just five years ago invested $1.4 billion in Terremark, is part of a larger trend by the telcos of getting into and then
(after discovering that competing with AWS wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be) getting out of the data center operations game. Indeed, CenturyLink last month agreed to sell its data center and colocation business for $2 billion; this is after the telco earlier spent $2.5 billion to acquire Savvis. And AT&T sold some data center assets to IBM last year.
As for the Juniper Networks-AppFormix deal, that’s being driven by the move by network operators to embrace architectures and technologies like the cloud, containers, open networking, and software-defined networking. AppFormix sells monitoring and performance optimization solutions that deliver application-level visibility to both private and public cloud network operators with OpenStack and Kubernetes environments. That, Juniper Networks said, complements its Contrail product line by improving cloud orchestration, accounting, planning, and security.
Meanwhile, Maurice Nagle, web editor for Transforming Network Infrastructure, this week offered an update on data center solutions provider Mellanox, and reported that Yahoo! Japan has tapped Infinera to supply it with the Cloud Xpress solution to interconnect its Osaka data centers. Miyuki Tsunekawa of Yahoo! Japan explained that Cloud Xpress enables the company to enjoy 100gbps performance without taking up as much space or power as some competing solutions.
Transforming Network Infrastructure this week also featured a guest piece by Scott Sobhani, CEO and co-founder of Cloud Constellations’s SpaceBelt. He wrote about the hybrid cloud and security.
