OREANDA-NEWS. December 01, 2015. Pragnesh Panchal has been working in the IT industry for 15+ years in technical and leadership roles. Before joining Equinix, he worked as an enterprise software architect responsible for end-to-end architecture and the implementation of external and internal portals. Earlier in his career at Equinix, Pragnesh drove platform teams and rolled out a number of horizontal platforms to power business and mission-critical applications.

Today as an Equinix Global Solutions Architect, Pragnesh works with Equinix customers, enterprises and strategic cloud service providers (CSPs) to evangelize next-gen architectures that help drive hybrid IT adoption. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his family, including three children. He also loves watching and playing cricket.

We talked to Pragnesh about his work helping enterprises solve some of their greatest IT and business challenges and his impressions from the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference.

Please describe the top challenges you are helping your customers overcome.

Pragnesh: Cloud is an evolutionary technology with wide-scale revolutionary impact on the enterprise. To add to the complexity, executive leaders are rapidly adjusting their business and IT strategies to absorb the impact from technology trends like IoT, BYOD, mobile, containers, multi-cloud, WebRTC and big data. I help enterprises develop strategies for integrating these technologies into their businesses by working with them to build a next-gen interconnection platform based on an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™.

What customer use cases can you share that demonstrate innovation in interconnection?

Pragnesh: Equinix has a results-driven, innovation culture that is focused on solving real-life, industry-wide issues using leading-edge innovative interconnection solutions. For example, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation service providers offer their services to enterprises using either generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnels or some form of point-to-point connectivity. This is usually a long and tedious process and not agile enough for today’s cloud era. The Equinix Cloud Exchange provides on-demand, private connectivity for DDoS providers, such as Incapsula, to route clean traffic back to the enterprise.

What were the main takeaways from the latest Oracle OpenWorld conference?

Pragnesh: Oracle Cloud’s sweet spot is clearly around data management, especially with its PaaS and IaaS offerings. Oracle Cloud is built to manage, visualize and extract intelligent insights from enterprise data. Its flagship product is still the Oracle database, now offered as a PaaS via Database-as-a-Service and Exadata-as-a-Service offerings.

These offerings, in combination with Oracle FastConnect, powered by Equinix Cloud Exchange, help address key enterprise data questions, such as: “How do I migrate a large volume of data quickly and securely from either my own private cloud or multiple public clouds?” and “What do I do with data that I do not want ‘at rest’ or ‘in-transit’ on the public Internet?”

Why is this important for enterprises?

Pragnesh: The extent to which an enterprise will be able to leverage Oracle public cloud offerings will be directly proportional to the amount and speed at which data can be pushed to and/or accessed from the Oracle Cloud. For Oracle Cloud to best support the aforementioned scenarios, you need fast, “fat” network pipes and a robust interconnection platform for workloads that demand predictable latency, significant throughput and reliable security. Oracle FastConnect and Equinix Cloud Exchange private connectivity are key enablers in making this happen and will be vital for enterprises who want Oracle public cloud services to work directly on top of on-premises data, without going over the public Internet.

Initial tests conducted by Equinix illustrate the significant performance gains that Oracle FastConnect via Equinix Cloud Exchange enable versus the Internet. For instance network throughput observed for database backup is up to 15x times better, database restore is up to 9.7x times better and compute services is up to 60x times better. This means that together, Oracle and Equinix can really provide enterprises with a compelling and competitive hybrid/multi-cloud strategy.

Get more details on the Oracle FastConnect Solution via the Equinix Cloud Exchange and these test results by downloading our Oracle OpenWorld presentation.