Article

Expanding Interconnection: ServiceFabric™ Presence, Capabilities and Partners

Alex Marcham, Sr. Director Product Strategy
November 10, 2022

For many businesses, connectivity is becoming an increasingly complex challenge due to the growing volume and value of data. Data is being generated from many more sources than it has been in the past; customers, internal business operations and a widening array of local, cloud and edge applications have combined to make the need for simple interconnection solutions, integrated into the workflows being used by these businesses, more pressing than ever. Connectivity powers the business.

With our global presence, the solutions we create for our customer’s technical and business challenges and our unique vision of where the industry is headed, Digital Realty is the ideal safe and open meeting place to help businesses address their evolving connectivity challenges in a new physical/virtual world of hybrid IT architecture, edge computing and IoT.

Recently, we launched our new service orchestration platform and product family, ServiceFabric. The first product line, ServiceFabric™ Connect, is focused on network connectivity and pre-engineered into PlatformDIGITAL® hubs. These services are ideally placed to help businesses across the world better address their interconnection challenges by providing fast and flexible ways for businesses to create and manage the interconnection solutions they need, to a span of destinations including our cloud, network and IT partners. ServiceFabric Connect provides software-defined interconnection on a single user interface and is available today across our colocation footprint in North America, Europe and Asia. It is supported by our Digital Realty backbone network, as well as by a growing number of network partners, whose connected destinations and unique capabilities are being integrated into the platform.

ServiceFabric expands to 99 total sites globally

We are excited to announce the expansion of ServiceFabric Connect to 38 new sites globally. This brings the number of Digital Realty-supported available sites to 99 worldwide and total sites available to end users up to 400+ through our partners. This expansive global presence provides users with unprecedented interconnection opportunities, made simple and accessible through our service orchestration platform.

Connect to:

99 available DLR-supported sites worldwide
400+ available sites through our partners

ServiceFabric Connect capabilities go beyond typical SDNs

Today, ServiceFabric Connect offers a complete set of connectivity services that allow businesses to be resiliently connected to the resources that matter to them, beyond typical software-defined network capabilities. These services are provided with no long-term commitment, as connectivity needs of the modern business are constantly evolving. They also support bandwidth scaling on demand and multiple services on one physical port.

ServiceFabric Connect provides:

Global layer 2 network connectivity
Global layer 3 network connectivity
Virtual router operation
Access to major cloud partners:
- Amazon AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
- Oracle Cloud
- And more to be announced…

With two ServiceFabric ports resiliently configured, we offer a 100% uptime SLA, in line with other high-end connectivity products in the market. If desired, the virtual layer 2 or layer 3 connections on that port can oversubscribe the port’s physical capacity and be sized according to the current need.

ServiceFabric Orchestration Grows Over Time

These capabilities are the first step in the long-term vision for ServiceFabric. As a service orchestration platform by design, ServiceFabric will support a significantly wider array of services in the future than it does today, as we continue to deliver on our feature and partner capabilities roadmap.

Today, a business can use ServiceFabric to create resilient connectivity between their resources in Los Angeles and their resources in New York. Over time, ServiceFabric will be able to instantiate a secure gateway at each side of that connection, giving the business assurance that their data can be protected without the need to deploy the typical physical enterprise security appliances that we see today. As the business begins to scale up its New York presence, more capabilities are needed; a load balancer to be comfortable that incoming requests won’t overload resources and a mobility gateway to manage all of the mobile devices being used by employees in the area, connecting to the corporate network at home.

This example shows the power of the service orchestration approach taken by ServiceFabric. Even if the initial set of capabilities offered by the platform are focused on connectivity services, because we have created a service orchestration platform, ServiceFabric will be able to orchestrate a much larger set of services for our customers in 2023 and beyond. Instantiating a virtual machine or container-based network appliance on to ServiceFabric, entirely virtually, and providing a business’ IT department with web and API interfaces to manage that virtual appliance as they would its physical equivalent, is a powerful capability that will let businesses quickly, consistently and cost-effectively expand their presence into new locations globally.

As a service orchestration platform, over time, ServiceFabric will be able to orchestrate a much larger set of services for our customers.

All of the traffic which that business cares about could then be controlled and routed into their virtual appliances, where their corporate security policies are applied, all through the ServiceFabric platform. This example scenario gives a glimpse into how ServiceFabric deployment, operation and scaling of key services will become simpler for businesses over time, as more services are added into the platform.

ServiceFabric integrates partners globally

To make scenarios like this possible, we are working to integrate a growing number of partners into the ServiceFabric platform. Our goal is to create a broad set of services within ServiceFabric, from both our own internal development efforts and those of our partners, that benefit businesses globally. To do this, we believe the best way is for ServiceFabric™ to enable, orchestrate and simplify, rather than to create capabilities like a firewall that would compete directly with our partner ecosystem.

By integrating capabilities from a wide range of partners into ServiceFabric, our customers will have an intuitive and integrated way to solve for key business challenges, with access to best of breed solutions across an expansive global footprint.