It was probably only a matter of time before more cloud vendors got serious about offering on-premises bare-metal solutions as part of the could services revolution.
Now, a press release today shows that Equinix has such a service, dubbed Equinix Metal, that’s purporting to offer AMD, Intel and Nvidia products in unison.
However, the menu of options might be a little difficult to navigate, with some pretty delicious word salad describing the bare-metal as-a-service options.
“Developers and IT leaders use Equinix Metal’s proven APIs, integrations with popular DevOps tools, and first-class Kubernetes ecosystem to deploy, maintain and scale their applications next to the clouds, users, networks and partners that matter most to their businesses,” spokesperson write.
Kewl.
Engineers cite some of the above-mentioned innovations as facets of “updated GEN3 configs” representing the latest in what Equinix has to offer in placing its own hardware on premises for clients, and connecting that to hybrid or native cloud systems.
Service will reportedly also offer access to Nvidia’s “Launchpad AI” service, along with workload optimized servers and hybrid multi-cloud on demand.
The bottom line is that customers will be able to rent Equinix’s own hardware and hook it up to correlating systems in the cloud. Experts suggest this approach leads to lower latency in general, and the compatibility can have other benefits, too.
The key is to decipher what these services look like, and not just scan a collection of IT buzzwords, for instance, from Kubernetes to devops.
One of the service’s most prominent patrons is the Solana blockchain, which is reportedly using the Equinix bare metal offering in providing new nodes. Solana is making news in the fintech world, and may prove a good example of Equinix bare metal applications.
This is a trend to watch for a technology portfolio, but there’s a lot more context to it than flowery descriptions of a vendor’s on-premise offerings.
