Equinix expands adds more processors to its bare-metal service

Data-center giant Equinix has expanded its bare-metal services to offer CPU, GPU, and AI processors on its Equinix Metal service offering.

The service now includes AMD’s Milan generation of Epyc processors, Ampere’s Arm-based Altra, and Intel’s Ice Lake generation of Xeon processors.

In November, Nvidia and Equinix announced an expanded collaboration to bring Nvidia’s LaunchPad AI platform, which includes instant, short-term access to AI infrastructure, to nine Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers globally. Enterprise accounts can test AI apps on LaunchPad, then deploy and scale on Equinix Metal or Nvidia DGX Foundry, which are also running at Equinix. 

Equinix Metal is a service launched after Equinix acquired bare-metal provider Packet in 2020. Initially launched in the U.S. and Europe, it is now available in 18 metros in the US, Europe, and Asia, and six more locations have just been added: Atlanta, Montreal, Helsinki, Stockholm, Melbourne, and Osaka.

Bare-metal service means customers lease the hardware–cores, memory, storage, and networking–and have to provide their own operating environment. In traditional IaaS/PaaS, the basic operating system and apps or dev tools are provided, and customers have to use the platform the provider offers.

In addition to on-demand hardware, Equinix Metal offers DevOps tools and a Kubernetes ecosystem. Certified operating systems include Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, NixOS, Talos, Alpine Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and VyOS. Equinix says it offers optimized configurations for specialized workloads like AI training or inference.

Equinix Metal has also been now certified for Nutanix Cloud Platform, a hybrid multi-cloud architecture that allows for movement between Nutanix private cloud on-premises and public clouds environments, with infrastructure management and operations across private and multiple public clouds. It also supports license portability across clouds so businesses can use their existing licenses on any supported cloud.