Cisco and Equinix announced that Equinix has deployed the Cisco Tail-f Network control system (NCS) that enables automated network and service provisioning for cloud providers and their enterprise.
The companies made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.
The NCS will power the Equinix Cloud Exchange-the Equinix Programmable Network.
Tail-f systems, now part of Cisco, provide multi-vendor orchestration and network automation solutions based on NETCONF and YANG.
Equinix Cloud Exchange provides on-demand, direct access to multiple clouds from multiple networks around the world. They provide virtualized, private direct connections that bypass the Internet to provide better security and performance.
Equinix chose the Tail-f technology for its vendor neutrality, providing a single network wide interface to all network devices, applications and servers, as well as common modeling language. This enables Equinix to provide multi cloud services in an agile and vendor agnostic way, simplifying and accelerating cloud access for the enterprise.
Many enterprises are pursuing a multi cloud architecture, in which applications span multiple private and public clouds. Equinix Cloud Exchange enables this via SDN foundation, the Equinix Programmable Network. Equinix Cloud Exchange offers the choice of cloud services including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer and others in the data center services industry.
The combination of Tail-f NCS together with Equinix’s SDN based architecture, enables enterprise to instantaneously provision new and direct connections to the cloud, the company said.
Equinix is currently available in 19 markets with additional expansion planned for Melbourne and Zurich in early 2015.
“Our goal with the Equinix Cloud Exchange is to provide multi cloud interconnectivity solutions that satisfy high performance application needs in a secure environment. Tail-f NCS is a key part of our fundamental programmable network and allow us to provide multi-cloud services in an agile and vendor neutral way,” said Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer, Equinix.
Shilpa Khatri