Following a US$200 million investment in 2020 in the Washington DC area, Equinix has opened a new data centre enabling businesses to grow at scale and speed.
Equinix has announced further expansion in the Washington DC area with the opening of its 16th International Business Exchange (IBX) data center, DC21.
With the addition of DC21, as well as the opening of the DC15 data center earlier this year, Equinix has invested more than US$200 million in the Washington DC area in 2020, as the area remains one of the most highly interconnected regions powering the global digital economy.
The new facilities strengthen Equinix’s position as a leading digital infrastructure and service provider in the Washington DC metro area offering businesses, as well as multinationals, increased opportunities to leverage a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure to power their success.
Equinix’s newest Washington DC area data centers are part of Equinix’s data center campus in Ashburn, VA, home to the largest Internet peering point in North America and one of the largest in the world – a strategic communications hub for the eastern US and a major gateway to Europe.
The expansion of its Ashburn Campus will provide Equinix additional capacity to respond to accelerating customer demand within the rapidly growing enterprise, government, cloud and financial services industries.
The Washington DC area is one of four markets that includes Equinix Metal, a new, fully automated and interconnected bare metal service launched in October. With this new service, companies have the option to deploy the physical infrastructure of their choice at software speed across Equinix’s trusted platform.
Together with other digital infrastructure building blocks in the Equinix portfolio, customers now have a broad range of physical and virtual deployment alternatives to place infrastructure wherever they need it and connect to everything they need to succeed.
The expansion of the Equinix Ashburn Campus also includes a Co-Innovation Facility (CIF) where leading technology vendors in the digital infrastructure space can test, demonstrate and evolve their products in collaboration with Equinix.
The CIF is a new capability, hosted by Equinix, that enables innovative suppliers to work with Equinix on trialing and developing methodologies that will be used to help define the future of digital infrastructure and services.
Highlights/ key facts
• DC21 is a two-story, state-of-the-art data center designed to deliver both small- and large-capacity deployments. The innovative, modular construction incorporates Equinix’s Flexible Data Center (FDC) principles, which leverage common design elements for space, power and cooling to reduce capital costs while ensuring long-term maintenance predictability. The US$95 million first phase of DC21 will provide more than 41,000 square feet of colocation space, offering an initial capacity of 925 cabinets. Upon completion of the planned future phases, DC21 is expected to provide total capacity of 3,100 cabinet equivalents and colocation space of more than 124,000 square feet.
• The US$111 million first phase of DC15 opened in Q2 2020 with an initial capacity of 1,600 cabinet equivalents and colocation space of approximately 23,000 square feet.
• The Washington DC metro represents the largest colocation market in the US and, with the opening of DC21, includes 16 Equinix IBX data centers that house more than 200 network service providers – more than any other data center provider in the Washington DC metro area. The Equinix Ashburn campus is the single most-dense interconnection hub in the US, providing proximity to financial enterprises, content and digital media services, global networks and cloud service provider.
• The Equinix Ashburn Campus provides a wide range of interconnection solutions, including Equinix Fabric – formerly Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric. Equinix Fabric is an on-demand, SDN-enabled interconnection service that allows any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other company’s distributed infrastructure, including the world’s largest network service and cloud providers on Platform Equinix. Through Equinix Fabric, customers in Ashburn can set up direct connectivity with international and local cloud service providers across the US, including Alibaba, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, SAP Cloud and SoftLayer, as well as major network service providers.
• Equinix’s long-term goal of using 100% clean and renewable energy for its global platform has resulted in significant increases in renewable energy coverage globally, including 100% renewable throughout the US. Equinix continues to make advancements in the way it designs, builds and operates its global platform, with high energy efficiency standards. DC21 and other Equinix Ashburn campus customers can benefit from reductions of their CO2 footprint through Equinix’s renewable energy procurement strategy and the use of energy-efficient systems throughout these facilities.
• Currently, the global footprint of Platform Equinix spans more than 225 IBX data centers across 63 markets and 26 countries, providing digital infrastructure and services for more than 9,500 of the world’s leading businesses. In the US, Equinix has more than 80 IBX data centers across key metros, including Silicon Valley, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Miami and Washington DC.
Kelly Morgan, Research Director at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said: “Ashburn, in Loudon County just outside of Washington DC, is a central connectivity hub and critically important to the US cloud and infrastructure story. Enterprises that previously did not see a need to improve networks may now, as a result of the pandemic, be open to new approaches and ready to try network hubs. This is placing an increased focus on data centers that can offer direct connections to the cloud with private on-ramps.”
Jon Lin, President, Americas, Equinix, said: “DC continues to prosper as a key digital hub for businesses around the world despite the challenges faced with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our continued expansion in this important metro creates more opportunities for businesses to leverage Platform Equinix as the central component to their digital foundation while enabling them to grow and scale at software speed.”
