OREANDA-NEWS. April 06, 2016. Projections about the deluge of data coming to swamp enterprises are pretty common, and well-founded. The Internet of Things (IoT) is already several billion “things” strong, and whether it reaches 20 billion things (Gartner) or 50 billion things (Cisco/DHL) by 2020, there’s no doubt unprecedented volumes of data will be streaming from the IoT soon enough. Companies that can’t get insight from its data in real-time will be at a serious competitive disadvantage. But Equinix Data Hub was built to help companies handle the data flood and access the intelligence it holds.

Data Hub allows the enterprise to build a global data center platform that can keep huge amounts of data close to where it’s produced or distribute it where it is needed for faster processing or analyses. It can also protect and replicate that data and keep it compliant. We got more details from Lance Weaver, VP of Product Offers & Platform Strategy at Equinix:

Can you talk about the state of the digital economy today and where Data Hub fits in?

Customers today are seeing an explosion of data from everywhere. At the same time, more data, applications and analytics are moving beyond the four walls of the enterprise into cloud systems. So the underlying enterprise architecture flips 180 degrees. Customers need a decentralized model, where they can deploy, govern and manage all this data in an agile distributed architecture. They need to have options like Data Hub that allow them to develop large data repositories and dispense, consume and process the data at the edge – close to the source and users. And they need to be able to efficiently leverage external resources like cloud-based analytics that they weren’t using before, because direct access to the data remained within the walls of their facility.

How does Data Hub do that?

Data Hub is deployed inside Equinix data centers, which are located in 40 metros worldwide, and that global reach gives a business flexibility to place its data at the nexus point, so multiple systems can access it. The company can deploy Data Hub to maintain security, governance and control of the data while leveraging the scalable computing power of a cloud provider for applications and analytics. The key here is that Data Hub is cloud and network agnostic. So with Data Hub, customers can make their data accessible to all of these sources, or applications, or services, and they don’t have to turn it over to the public cloud provider’s system.

What is the relationship between Data Hub and Equinix Performance Hub?

Data Hub is an extension of Performance Hub. Performance Hub is meant for communications, it’s a routing hub for the enterprise, while Data Hub provides a scalable repository for data content. To visualize how they work together, Data Hub is a large footprint of systems for data ingestion and analytics securely connected over redundant, high-speed connections to Performance Hub, which in turn connects the global enterprise network to public and private cloud services. This combination allows our Data Hub customers to securely manage huge volumes of data, and receive or deliver real-time insight from it, wherever it resides.

Learn more about Data Hub.