​Equinix has announced a substantial expansion of its dedicated access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The global data center company and Gold-level member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) will be adding 16 Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in North America and Europe.

The end result? Customers will be equipped to easily and privately connect using OCI FastConnect within the Equinix FR5 IBX data center in Frankfurt via dedicated cross connects and the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX).

Furthermore, the Oracle and Equinix partnership provides connectivity to OCI FastConnect via ECX to customers in seven new metros in Europe and eight in north America.

The companies affirm interconnection is paramount for companies across North America and Europe. This is already apparent with the recently published Global Interconnection Index, which found that interconnection bandwidth in Europe is expected to grow 44 percent per annum to reach 1,450+ Tbps by 2020.

Equinix asserts this will be driven by a number of factors, including data sovereignty and the need for European businesses to exchange information with other businesses and services, like Oracle, in-region.

In addition to Frankfurt, new European metros where OCI FastConnect is now available via ECX include Amsterdam, Dublin, London, Manchester, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich.

The expansion brings the total number of Equinix IBX data centers where Oracle FastConnect is deployed to six and total number of locations where connectivity to FastConnect is available to 18 metros, globally.

Global managing director for the Oracle Strategic Alliance at Equinix, Robert Blackburn says they are excited to continue the collaboration with Oracle and extend the service to multiple European and US metros.

“The ability to connect directly to Oracle is an essential strategy for enterprises as they deploy workloads to the cloud. By providing direct access, our mutual customers can create a high-speed, dedicated and low-latency connection that allows them to fully realise the benefits of Oracle deployment, while complying with local data sovereignty regulations,” says Blackburn.

We look forward to ongoing collaborations with Oracle, bringing this solution to additional Equinix metro areas across the globe.

According to Oracle's vice president of IAAS and Public Cloud Services, Kash Ifitikhar, the expansion will enable enterprise customers across North America and Europe to migrate and run compute, applications and data workloads to Oracle Cloud in a high-throughput, scalable manner that delivers consistent and predictable performance.

“Customers require seamless connectivity from their data centers and networks to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for their most demanding workloads and applications,” says Ifitikhar.

“With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using FastConnect in Equinix IBX data centers, customers can provision the private connections they need today and easily scale with their growing business demands. We look forward to helping more customers connect to Oracle cloud using FastConnect and ECX in a growing number of markets.