Hyperscale, Canada, Equinix, clouds, uptake
With long weekends approaching in the US and Canada, there was a relative slowdown in activity across the sector.
On the ground, hyperscale continues to be a primary driver of growth. And it continues to push over borders on a global basis. Digital Realty, for example, recently opened up a new wholesale data centre in the Toronto suburb of Vaughn. Meanwhile, Equinix is now making a more concerted push into the wholesale colocation market. Its new hyperscale infrastructure team, led by Jim Smith, formerly of Microsoft, will be driving this initiative and we got to hear some of the details at Equinix’s recent Analyst Day in New York.
The cloud build out continues. Google recently expanded in Finland and Los Angeles, while Azure added data centres in Norway.
The strategic side of things was somewhat slower in the past week. On the SMB side, WP Engine made an acquisition, while services and technology vendor Continuum acquired a security firm.
The larger trends in play across the sector continued to play out in the last week. For example, organizations continue to make big bets on cloud and Barclays Bank was the latest to say it is going all-in. And the edge computing concept is getting closer and closer to reality. One of these new firms that are building micro data centres for the edge – the aptly named EdgeMicro – teamed up with Compass’s BitBox for its management platform. And live deployments are said to be up and running. On the product side, there was more activity around containers and Google is tweaking its compute infrastructure offerings to handle compliance-sensitive scenarios.
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