Digital Realty, a leading global provider of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, announced PlatformDIGITAL™, a first of its kind global data center platform designed to enable customers to scale digital business.

With the digital economy set to reshape both private and public enterprises across all industries, organizations recognize the need to transform their IT infrastructure so that they can operate ubiquitously and on-demand, informed by real-time intelligence.

“Gartner predicts that by 2022, 60% of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers.* As a result, there is a growing industry imperative to create new centers of data that reside between the core and the edge,” said Digital Realty Chief Executive Officer A. William Stein. “With the announcement of PlatformDIGITAL™, we uniquely enable customers to deploy their IT infrastructure at the centers of data exchange around the world, bringing users, things, applications, clouds and networks to the data. Our customers get the advantage of access to fit-for-purpose infrastructure that can power their digital transformations at the scale and speed they require today and into the future.”

PlatformDIGITAL™ provides a trusted foundation enabling customers to:

• solve global coverage, capacity, and ecosystem connectivity needs with a single data center provider
• tailor infrastructure deployments and controls matched to business needs irrespective of data center size, scale, location, configuration or ecosystem interconnections
• operate deployments as a seamless extension of any global infrastructure with the consistent experience, security, and resiliency that business demands
• enable global distributed workflows at centers of data exchange to remove data gravity barriers and scale digital business

Platform Roadmap

To support PlatformDIGITAL™, Digital Realty’s Pervasive Datacenter Architecture approach (PDx) provides a step-by-step strategy to create the new IT architecture required for digital transformation. PDx was developed by enterprise IT practitioners and was created by codifying hundreds of product deployment combinations into repeatable implementation patterns to enable companies to accelerate deployment and improve the precision of their infrastructure to scale digital business globally.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that organizations are faced with a growing number of locations, applications and sensors, all generating information at the edge, and must find new ways to aggregate and optimize data exchange to survive,” said Kelly Morgan, VP of Services at the 451 Group. “Our enterprise IT research published today shows that over 70% of enterprises plan to expand geographically within the next two years, putting further pressure on their IT infrastructure. Deploying data hubs in professionally-managed multi-customer data centers will be one of the essential elements of a successful enterprise strategy to harness the value of this data by moving elements of IT closer to where it is being processed and utilized.”

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Introducing New Enterprise IT Solutions

Digital Realty is uniquely positioned to address this shifting IT paradigm, providing customers with access to new centers of data exchange in more than 210 data centers deployed on PlatformDIGITAL™ across 36 metros and 15 countries. Building on this foundation, Digital Realty is launching four new enterprise IT solutions today, based on successful architectural blueprints, that can be rapidly deployed on PlatformDIGITAL™:

• Network Hub for Rewiring the Network: consolidates and localizes traffic into ingress/egress points to optimize network performance and cost
• Control Hub for Implementing Hybrid IT Controls: hosts adjacent Security & IT controls to improve security posture and IT operations, tailored infrastructure deployments matching hyper-converged infrastructure configurations and density requirements for control points
• Data Hub for Optimizing Data Exchange: localizes data aggregation, staging, analytics, streaming and data management to optimize data exchange and maintain data compliance
• SX Fabric for Interconnecting Global Workflows: adds SDN overlay to service chain multi-cloud and B2B application ecosystems. Connects hubs across metros and regions to enable secure, highly-efficient and distributed workflows

PlatformDIGITAL™ and PDx provide organizations the strategy and tools to meet next-generation digital needs and are now available to enterprise customers globally.

Industry adoption

Customers including Mavenir, Syngenta and others are already seeing the benefits of deploying their IT infrastructure on PlatformDIGITAL™. For example, Syngenta, a global agrochemical innovator, chose Digital Realty to develop a new edge infrastructure leveraging Network and Control Hub solutions that will support the company’s mission to address food scarcity through smart farming practices. Deploying on PlatformDIGITAL™ enables Syngenta to get closer to their global customers and improve application performance, all while consolidating and reducing their network costs.

“As a global innovator, we need partners that help our research scientists collaborate internally and with the wider industry in real-time using distributed data sets generated around the world,” said Bartek Madej, Syngenta’s Global Head of Network and Collaboration. “Digital Realty provides the flexibility and customization required for us to scale our IT architectures, operate at higher densities and extend workflows globally. The integrated platform approach provides the network diversity and cloud connectivity we need to usher in the future of smart agriculture.”

Business Mobility on PlatformDIGITAL™ with Mavenir

Mavenir, the industry’s only end-to-end, cloud-native Network Software Provider, chose PlatformDIGITAL™ to deploy its Mobile Business Fabric™, a dynamic and fluid business communications framework designed to meet the evolving digital needs of businesses as mobility becomes a primary driver and customers demand change.

“When we introduced our new business mobility portfolio, we needed to be able to interconnect multiple Mavenir data centers across different geographies without impacting the user experience and without having to go for complex architecture,” said Guillaume Le Mener, SVP/GM, Enterprise Business Unit, Mavenir. “With Digital Realty, we are able to grow our business in different geographies around the world, collaborating with other network operators smoothly and efficiently on PlatformDIGITAL™.”

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Partner Community for PlatformDIGITAL™

Digital Realty is building a rich community of technology, alliance and channel partners, including Cisco, IBM Cloud and Bridgepointe Technologies who bring unique expertise to customers to extend the value of the enterprise IT solutions offered on PlatformDIGITAL™ to scale digital transformation.

“We are excited to be able to deploy Cisco Secure Agile Exchange as a network hub solution within Digital Realty’s global footprint of data centers, at the crossroads of Internet traffic,” said Sridhar Sikha, Product Solution Manager, Cisco. “Bringing our solution to PlatformDIGITAL™ will help enable enterprises to quickly and securely interconnect users to applications by virtualizing the network edge and extending it to colocation centers globally.”

“The majority of businesses today want to modernize their operations in order to stay competitive, and many are adopting hybrid cloud strategies in order to make this transformation,” said Paul Hertzfeldt, Offering Manager for IBM Cloud. “Through our partnership with Digital Realty, and with the release of PlatformDIGITAL™, we’re giving enterprises even more choice in how they securely migrate workloads to IBM’s public cloud and harness the technologies that can truly impact their bottom line.”

“Our customers are looking for a partner who can help them scale as they open new locations, establish new business relationships and expand their footprint into new markets,” said Brian Miller, Founder of Bridgepointe Technologies. “PlatformDIGITAL™ allows us to start small and have scope to easily scale for our customers as their digital business grows, with a single data center provider. We’re very excited to be taking our collaboration with Digital Realty to the next level.”

Digital Realty and Vapor IO announced last week that they have formed an alliance to deploy Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge® Exchange (KEX) in Digital Realty’s centers of data exchange campuses. At MarketplaceLIVE, Digital Realty is announcing today that the Kinetic Edge Exchange will be offered as part of the PlatformDIGITAL™ Network Hub Solution. Vapor IO’s KEX will be deployed in centers of data exchange on Digital Realty’s connected campuses, starting with Atlanta and Chicago in early 2020. By integrating the KEX into Digital Realty’s campuses as part of PlatformDIGITAL™, workloads in these locations can elastically span to the edge, making it possible to build new distributed workflows spanning from core to edge to dynamically scale digital business.

This Core to Edge Network Hub solution incorporates the Kinetic Edge Fabric (KEF) and KEX to connect and coordinate traffic exchange between PlatformDIGITAL™ and Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge deployments. As a result, endpoint workloads computed at the Kinetic Edge are passed to the Digital Realty Campus to connect to upstream workflow processing, data analysis and retention.

“Digital Realty’s approach to edge complements Vapor IO’s nationwide deployment strategy and allows us to, together, deliver a true core-to-edge continuum. Integrating the Kinetic Edge Exchange with the PlatformDIGITAL™ Network Hub solution will create a ‘network-effect’ of new value and unleash a new generation of applications,” said Cole Crawford, Founder and CEO of Vapor IO. “By combining Vapor IO’s edge footprint with Digital Realty’s centers of data exchange, our mutual customers can extend digital workflows all the way out to the edge and can also connect to any of the Service Exchange networks.”

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