Chris Hunsaker, Director of Content and Digital Media at Equinix, highlighted the importance of choice in choosing data center solutions for the enterprise with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara this week.

“Equinix is a global carrier-neutral data center provider,” Hunsaker explained. “Our proposition is that you have to offer customers choice,” not just a great set of services. To that extent, Equinix works with several carriers and over 500 cloud service providers. For a company to get the best performance, it has to find the right location, be connected to the right network providers, know about what customers want from them and optimize for it. “The overall concept is about choice, there’s not gonna be one solution to work for all,” Hunsaker said.

New opportunities with cloud + services

There is “a lot of opportunity, with the development of cloud and services. Companies can architect their solutions in a way they never could before,” Hunsaker said. “They can get performance and scale at a price model that they couldn’t get before.”

A common deployment scenario for Equinix, Hunsaker said, involved a company having had an initial setup, a starting solution, which they would need to then scale, growing out of their initial solution. The company recommends which carriers and providers to use to get the best performance and the lowest cost.

Equinix works with companies in the search, gaming, and streaming media segments and helps them “meet goals in terms of performance, overall capability, [and] helps them connect to service providers” to build the overall solution that suits them best.

On Amazon as a partner

Asked about the company’s partnership with Amazon, Hunsaker said Equinix offered its customers Amazon Direct Connect solutions. For companies that want to leverage the Amazon public cloud, the main challenge is connecting to it though an IP and moving data in and out of it. “We help them get a direct connect to the Amazon public cloud and be able to securely and quickly move content back and forth.”

One big advantage, Vellante pointed out, was the physically proximity to  Amazon. “Our infrastructure and resources are kept together,” Hunsaker agreed, thus offering very low latency.

At Velocity, Equinix is “all about performance and innovation,” sharing its message and talking about the concept with the community.

Asked if the web was indeed getting faster, as Velocity aims to build a faster web, Hunsaker said “the web is getting more interesting. The jury may be out overall for the long term perspective.”