In November 2024, Equinix announced their decision to sunset their bare metal offering. This means that bare metal customers whose services are being sunset, now need to migrate their services to ensure business continuity. Those that have only used the Equinix platform now need to find, procure, train staff, architect, and migrate their workloads to the new provider.

As a leading provider of global edge networks, NetActuate can help Equinix customers migrate, rearchitect, and run their services to ensure business continuity.

Metal customers often use a wide range of Equinix services, which means that customers are faced with the following choices:

• Migrate the entirety of their edge stack to a different provider
• Deploy their edge compute services with a different provider and deal with additional third-party solutions that require setup and integrations.

However, NetActuate offers a third option, whereby customers can migrate their Metal services to the NetActuate platform with minimal disruption and coexist with their existing Equinix footprint. 

For example, Equinix customers can move their Metal workload to NetActuate and continue using the rest of their existing Equinix services, such as IX ports, colocation, direct connects into public cloud providers, and even facilitate metro cross connects and transport between sites. 

Not only that, but NetActuate also provides managed services for third-party services, so customers can have a single management layer across multiple infrastructure service providers. 

The NetActuate Advantage

Besides ensuring continuity of your services and ensuring minimal migration disruption, NetActuate’s edge services also provide a range of advantages, namely: 

Extended Feature Set

• Anycast network –  network addressing and routing method in which multiple servers can share the same IP address, whereby requests can be routed to the closest point of presence for the lowest network latency.
• Multi-region deployments – deployed to multiple geographic regions (or multiple Data Centers) to provide for your end-customer’s performance (think latency) or legal requirements (like data sovereignty).
• DevOps integrations – integrating with customers’ CI/CD tools and version control systems.
• Exposing features via APIs – allowing the network and compute services to be integrated in customer’s tech stacks 
• Infrastructure-as-code support – supporting script-based infrastructure configuration and provisioning using tools such as Terraform.
• Kubernetes compatibility – can support containerized applications orchestrated using Kubernetes across geographies.

Flexibility and open-source support

• Customers can run your edge services on their choice of standard commodity hardware, custom FPGAs, GPUs, SANs, network gear, and terrestrial systems. These are procured, configured and can be managed by NetActuate.
• Choice of Linux distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Gentoo
• Choice of BSD operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD
• Open source networking software, such as VyOS

Bespoke solutions

• Architect custom network solutions – such as direct cross-connects to ensure solution uptime even in the event of loss of public internet connectivity.
• Custom requests – for example, producing Grafana dashboards, with appropriate security controls, a customer-facing reporting dashboard in the NetActuate portal for improved network visibility

A partnership-driven business model

• Extension of your team – have on-demand access to the most experienced network and peering engineers in the industry.
• Hands-on, white-glove support  – team of veteran engineers ready to provision physical deployments in any of our 40+ global markets.
• Proof-of-concept deployments – 30-day POC test the solution in real-world conditions, starting with a small deployment in a single or small number of PoPs to validate the setup before expanding to additional PoPs. 
• 24x7x365 support – all NetActuate Anycast customers have round-the-clock chatops access to our experts, and optional vNOC support if desired. 

Conclusion 

NetActuate is the trusted infrastructure partner for the world’s most ambitious digital innovators. Our network, cloud, services, and team help our customers’ products take flight. Knowing our lane and staying in it has been a cornerstone of our success. Like the BASF ads of the 1990s, NetActuate doesn’t make the CDN, we make it available in more markets. We don’t make the DNS filtering service, we make it more reliable. And we don’t make the developer platform, we make it faster. By focusing on what we do best—innovative infrastructure and networking solutions—we empower your services to shine.