Data center vendor Equinix will offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute in 16 markets in four continents.
Equinix is also opening an ExpressRoute preview site in London. The initiative will allow enterprises to deploy hybrid environments in new markets.
ExpressRoute, which is designed to maximize customers’ on-premises investments by extending their network beyond their existing data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure, is available to select customers as a public preview at Equinix IBX data centers in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.
Equinix will announce the general availability of ExpressRoute later this spring. The company will roll out the service in multiple metro areas in Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America throughout 2014.
Connecting to Azure via Equinix allows enterprises to bridge their cloud and data center strategies, benefiting from full integration between cloud services and internal applications.
Both Equinix and Microsoft integrated Azure cloud services with private secure connectivity via an Equinix switching fabric to provide virtual connections with near real-time provisioning across fully redundant paths to and from Microsoft Azure. Azure will appear as seamless extension to a physical datacenter.
