Blue Box + Equinix = Private Cloud (Almost) Everywhere

By Jesse Proudman

More and more, those benefits can be delivered by hosted private cloud providing IT without the headache and burden of both owning and operating not only physical infrastructure, but the breadth and depth required to truly run a full stack of cloud empowering software.

That said there has been one challenge that plagued most hosted private cloud deployments: latency. Organizations benefit from the ability to interconnect private clouds with existing hardware stack, but without local LAN level latencies, the results can be disappointing.

That is, until today...

The Blue Box Vision: Hosted Private Cloud Available Globally

At Blue Box, a key tenet of our long-term vision is the ability spin up a private cloud in less than one hour with minimal latency to a global set of data centers.

We’re delighted to announce we’ve taken another big step toward fulfilling that vision. Today, Blue Box announced that we’ve partnered with Equinix to integrate Blue Box Cloud into the Equinix Cloud Exchange.

The Equinix Cloud Exchange is an advanced interconnection solution that bridges cloud service providers with end user customers and their existing data center footprints. Cloud Exchange dramatically reduces provisioning time on data center cross connects, eases cross connect management and opens up broader possibilities for multi-cloud deployments. Most importantly, Cloud Exchanges facilitates the reduction in latency between on-premise or self-hosted data centers, and OpenStack-powered, private Blue Box Cloud deployments.

Initially, we’re launching close to home with Blue Box Cloud available at Equinix’s Seattle SE3 International Business Exchange (IBX®) data center. The Equinix Cloud Exchange platform is currently available in 17 markets – Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., New York, Toronto, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Equinix has plans to add two more cities by the end of 2014.

Additional Blue Box Cloud sites are scheduled to come online in the quarters ahead.

Three things are important about the availability of Blue Box Cloud on the Equinix Cloud Exchange:

• Blue Box Cloud is the first private cloud as a service available in the Cloud Exchange program.
• Cloud Exchange supports hybrid cloud deployments via blindingly fast interconnects with both major public clouds and private clouds.
• This release is the first step in an expanding relationship with the most cloud-friendly data center operator on the planet.

Blue Box is on a march to bring all of the benefits of Private Cloud without the operational challenges of actually running that cloud to organizations globally. This announcement is the first domino to drop in that vision and we’re delighted to share the next with you over the coming weeks and months.

You can read the full press release here.

- Jesse Proudman