The new collab leverages Equinix’s Bare Metal as a Service
International telco Orange and data center operator Equinix this week announced a collaboration that sees Orange deploying its New Generation International Network – eNGINe – using Equinix’s Bare Metal as a Service.
The new partnership promises on-demand telco cloud Points of Presence (PoPs) with services including Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), 5G roaming and voice services, all delivered with latency below 10 milliseconds. The companies plan to roll out the new service in Amsterdam, Madrid and Seattle by the end of the year. Each telco cloud PoP can host virtualized network service functions and connect to content and cloud service providers.
Orange already operates 40 software-defined network (SDN) PoPs around the world, with plans to deploy more than 100 by 2024. The new deal with Equinix will hasten that timetable, according to Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Orange’s EVP of international networks.
“By embracing an ‘as a service’ infrastructure model and focusing investment in our SDN and [Virtual Network Function] capabilities, Orange can provide a fully flexible and elastic solution to customers, speed up the deployment of our planned 100 Telco Cloud PoPs, and quickly adapt capacity to meet demand,” said Vuillemin.
Zachary Smith, Equinix’s Global Head of Edge Infrastructure Services, explained the new partnership in a recent discussion with RCR Wireless News.
“What they approached us with last year is this very ambitious push towards the edge. They want to bring their network and services to 100 global locations, and do so with full automation. They wanted to move to a highly automated deployment and scalability model,” Smith said. “And that aligned really well with what Equinix has been doing with our digital services, which is to provide neutral fundamental access to our global platform, which is now in more than 240 data centers and 70 markets around the world.”
Smith explained that the new service will enable Orange to instantiate new PoPs in weeks, versus months or years. But that’s only the start.
“Our goal with Orange is to be able to deploy and destroy production-grade 5G core and NFV in hours. And if we can do that, this can accelerate the innovation of how software can move. We like to say, moving infrastructure at software speed, allowing operators like Orange to become much more agile in their use of this technology,” said Smith.
Equinix Metal is “is a highly automated bare-metal platform for automating hardware, as well as our network edge platform for access to networking and our fabric for virtual connections and interconnection,” Smith explained.
“We invested almost a year to support Orange to be able to automatically deploy their virtual PoP infrastructure on Equinix Metal,” he said. Parallel to that, said Smith, his company has been “industrializing Equinix Metal from core cloud-native applications into high performance production-grade networking infrastructure.”
Smith sees the new collaboration with Orange as a promising way for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to be able to scale infrastructure on demand where it’s needed in a more agile way.
“The real business unlock is for customers to move services to an expanded geographic footprint faster, and bring that kind of edge connectivity and intelligence, whether it’s for business networks or consumer, closer to their end users,” he said.
“We’re enabling infrastructure for clouds, and content providers, and service providers, to also be able to go closer [to the user] instead of having to build everything themselves,” said Smith.
