LF Edge, an umbrella organization in the Linux Foundation, celebrated its one-year birthday by announcing on Tuesday that colocation and data center giant Equinix has joined as a "premier member."
In addition to its membership, Equinix Chief Technology Offer Justin Dustzadeh also became the newest member of LF Edge's governing board. Premier members also get a seat on LF Edge's technical advisory council as well as a say in how and where the project spends money. Prior to joining LF Edge, Equinix was a member of the Linux Foundation.
"Equinix is pleased to join LF Edge to collaborate with the community on developing open, cloud-neutral frameworks for edge computing including its ever-increasing use cases and diverse set of requirements across the technology stack," said Dustzadeh, in a statement. "We look forward to sharing our experience and learnings with the community given our unique position as the global datacenter and interconnection platform for ecosystems of networks, clouds and enterprises.
"We believe the role we play in delivering neutral, secure, richly-connected and cloud-adjacent digital infrastructure at the edge, leveraging virtualization, software-defined and cloud-native technologies, will provide valuable insights to the LF Edge organization."
There are various types of "edges" in the telecommunications industry that are being backed by different industry players, including telcos, cloud providers, managed service providers and cable operators. LF Edge supports emerging edge applications across areas such as non-traditional video as well as services and applications that require low latency, faster processing and mobility.
By coming up with a software stack that merges cloud, enterprise and telecom interests, LF Edge is seeking to unify the various edge entities around a common vision for the industry. Services and applications such as 5G, IoT, augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles require low latency, which has pushed network functions closer to the edge. Service providers and hyperscale cloud providers are moving core components closer to the edge in order to meet the emerging low latency requirements.
As the largest colocation company, Equinix brings more than 200 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers across over 50 countries into the LF Edge fold. Equinix's public cloud on-ramps and interconnected ecosystems serve more than 10,000 customers globally, including the world's largest cloud providers, telcos, Fortune 500 companies and Global 2000 companies.
"What better way to celebrate one year as a project than by welcoming Equinix as the newest Premier member of LF Edge," said the Linux Foundation's Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, automation, edge and IoT, in a statement. "Their expertise in data center and interconnection services will be especially valuable as operators need to move resources even closer to the edge with the roll out of 5G. We are excited to collaborate with Equinix as we build a stronger platform for innovation at the edge."
A year ago, the Linux Foundation launched LF Edge to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating systems.
LF Edge is currently comprised of seven projects – including Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl, Fledge, EdgeX Foundry, Home Edge, Open Glossary of Edge Computing, and Project EVE.
RELATED: LF Edge serves up second helping of Arkraino Edge Stack
Last month, LF Edge announced the second release of its Akraino Edge Stack, which is a framework to address 5G, IoT, AI and a range of edge use cases.
Equinix joined a growing roster of more than 70 current members of LF Edge, which includes existing premier members Altran, Arm, AT&T, Baidu, Charter Communications, Dell EMC, Dianomic, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP Inc., HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, inwinStack, Juniper Networks, MobiledgeX, Netsia, Nokia Solutions, NTT, OSIsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Radisys, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, Seagate Technology, Tencent, WindRiver, Wipro, and ZEDEDA.
Equinix improves efficiencies with Oracle
It's been a busy year so far for Equinix. Earlier this month, SD-WAN and firewall vendor Fortinet announced an SD-WAN deal with Equinix. In order to better serve enterprise customers, Fortinet has paired its Fortinet Secure SD-WAN with Equinix's Network Edge marketplace. Last month, Equinix announced it was buying the bare metal data center company Packet, but didn't provide any of the financial details.
Also on Tuesday, Oracle announced that Equinix, which has a long-standing partnership with Oracle, was using its Exadata Database Machine as a core Oracle Database transaction engine to run its growing business. Prior to using Oracle's Exadata, Equinix was using a do-it-yourself infrastructure environment comprised of Oracle Database and servers combined with storage and networking products from multiple vendors.
By moving to Oracle Exadata, Equinix is able to run its applications an estimated 30% to 40% faster with some workloads showing 100% improvement. Equinix also eliminated an estimated 12 hours of service downtime for database server patching per year and further reduced application patching downtime by 90%, according to Oracle