Equinix completed the global rollout of its SDN-based connectivity platform, Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric). It now supports connections between all of the interconnection giants 37 ECX Fabric markets across five continents.

This includes Amsterdam; Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Culpeper, Virginia; Dallas; Denver; Dublin, Ireland; Dusseldorf, Germany; Frankfurt, Germany; Geneva; Helsinki; Hong Kong; Houston; London; Los Angeles; Madrid; Manchester, England; Melbourne, Australia; Miami; Milan; Munich; New York; Osaka, Japan; Paris; Perth, Australia; São Paulo; Seattle; Silicon Valley, California; Singapore; Stockholm; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto; Warsaw, Poland; Washington, D.C.; and Zurich.

The company first launched ECX Fabric in December 2017. A year and a half later, more than 1,400 customers including enterprises, cloud providers, and network service providers use the fabric to privately interconnect clouds, networks, and services and have established more than 14,900 active virtual connections to it.

“When we announced it we said this is what we're aspiring to be: this vision where any Cloud Exchange customer could connect to any other Cloud Exchange customer anywhere in the world," said Bill Long, vice president of interconnection services at Equinix. “What we're announcing now is that we're there."

Customers can use the platform to connect to clouds in other regions, and they can also establish on-demand network connections between the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Brazil. This global nature has led to a couple prominent use cases, Long said.

“The first one is customers are using the capability to reach out-of-metro clouds,” he said.

For example, Chicago-based Havi Group uses it to privately connect to clouds in other regions, such as transferring backup data to Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud region in Ashburn, Virginia. “That's the most predominant use case we're seeing today," Long said.

The second major use case is cloud redundancy. “If you are in Ashburn on AWS East and you want to have a redundant cloud deployment with AWS West but you might not be physically deployed in [Silicon Valley], you can now use the fabric to connect to AWS West,” Long said. This makes companies' data more resilient and makes them more willing to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud.