November 05, 2014

CNBC: Google shacks up with Equinix for cloud boost

From CNBC, November 5, 2014

For the 100 billion Internet searches and more than 6 billion hours of YouTube videos streamed monthly, Google is building supersized data centers across the globe. But for certain functions, the company is better off using other people’s property.

Equinix, which operates more than 100 data centers in 32 metro areas worldwide, is announcing on Wednesday that Google will be using its facilities to help clients in 15 markets, including New York, Atlanta, Frankfurt, Germany, and Hong Kong, access Google’s business applications and cloud infrastructure.

The Google cloud needs all the help it can get. While the Mountain View, California-based company dominates the online advertising market, it’s playing catch-up to Amazon Web Services in on-demand cloud computing as it also battles Microsoft’s Azure technology.

The three companies are engaged in a brutal price war as they try to lure businesses looking to offload their computing and storage instead of handling it internally. Amazon and Microsoft are already Equinix customers. Now businesses can use any or all of them via Equinix.

“This completes our access to the big three cloud providers,” said Equinix Chief Technology Officer Ihab Tarazi. Businesses can “get significantly higher bandwidth for very low economics and be able to completely leverage the cloud.”

Google disclosed the deal with Equinix on Tuesday as one of several announcements tied to its cloud platform. The company also introduced Google Container Engine and a partnership with Docker to make it easier to create and manage applications across machines.

It’s all part of Google’s deeper dive into the world of business software, and it’s not cheap. In the third quarter, Google spent $2.4 billion on capital expenditures, largely on data center construction and real estate costs.

“Everybody’s moving their infrastructures to the cloud,” Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said on the earnings call last month. “It is an area where we have fundamentally great assets to contribute to this industry, both in terms of the flexibility, the cost structure, the technology. And that’s why we’re investing heavily in there.”

Google owns and operates 12 data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia, according to its website. Much of the software that Google as well as Amazon and Facebook have developed to bolster the speed and capacity of servers and databases is being replicated across the technology industry.

But that doesn’t mean corporate America is ready to spin all of its most critical data up to the public cloud. Using Equinix, they can plug into the power of Google’s infrastructure without relying on it entirely.

Equinix has more than 4,500 customers using its facilities. In April, the Redwood City, California-based company launched a service called Cloud Exchange to provide an added layer of security and enhanced connectivity for businesses that may have previously been reluctant to move applications to the cloud.