Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage | KJ Joshi, Equinix

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KJ Joshi

Managing Director, Platform Alliances

Equinix

Equinix on how sovereign cloud is reshaping AI adoption and multicloud strategies

The development of artificial intelligence is accelerating faster than the cloud boom of the last decade. As cloud ecosystems expand, the next wave of...

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play_circle_outline Equinix's pivotal role in hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems: definition, evolution, and impact explained

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play_circle_outline Liquid cooling technology in data centers

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KJ Joshi, Equinix

KJ Joshi

Managing Director, Platform Alliances Equinix

Equinix's Global Managing Director discusses AI trends and sovereign cloud adoption, emphasizing Equinix's role as a network backbone with over 40% market share in cloud on-ramps. Recent launches on AWS Marketplace, like Fabric Cloud Router and IPWAN, enable customers to connect multiple clouds and regions. Partnerships with companies like Dell, HPE, and NVIDIA offer customers options for deploying workloads in different cloud environments. Energy availability, sustainability, and efficient networking are key considerations, with renewable power sources gaini... Read more

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What is Fabric Cloud Router and IPWAN used for in terms of cloud connectivity? add

What changes are happening in the definitions of hybrid cloud and multi cloud? add

What are some examples of partnerships and offerings in the redefined cloud world that cater to the needs of enterprise customers looking for hybrid cloud solutions? add

What did the speaker see during their tour of a Dell AI lab in November? add

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KJ Joshi, Equinix

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to our coverage of re:Invent 2024. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also in the house. KJ Joshi is here. He's the Global Managing Director for Platform Alliances at Equinix. Everybody knows Equinix. Great to have you on.

KJ Joshi

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Vellante

>> Super. Actually, I loved having the conversation with Equinix because when the cloud first came out they were like, "Oh, these guys are in big trouble." And we were always, "No, no, watch what happens." And sure enough, it's just been a super cycle. I know that's an overused term, but your business has been exploding and we've been following the ascendancy ever since. You play a critical role in the ecosystem, so how's it going? What's happening here at re:Invent? Before we get into that, tell us about your role.

KJ Joshi

>> Well, thank you so much for having me, first of all. I am responsible for managing all the hyper scaler partnerships across the major OEMs, hyper scalers and some of the service providers. I've been with the company now 14 years, in a couple of different roles and most recently I've taken our Platform Alliances partnerships

Dave Vellante

>> And the trends are just off the charts. Obviously AI, but the whole sovereign cloud thing is a tailwind for you guys. And that's real, isn't it?

KJ Joshi

>> Absolutely. The adoption is real. It's actually much more accelerated than cloud was, because I'm talking about AI, sovereign AI. And where cloud was about 10, 12 years ago, AI is today. But the adoption rate of AI is going to be a lot faster than the cloud is. So we are expecting the market to be roughly around 300 billion for AI alone. And today cloud market is at 300 billion. So think about how fast the market is adopting for AI.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, you're right. If you include the hyper scalers, the big three, probably a couple hundred billion, then there's another a hundred billion.

KJ Joshi

>> And the GPU as service providers, that's a new emerging segment, where you're seeing these specialty clouds like CoreWeave and Denvr Data and Crucible. So that's going to be another a hundred billion.

Dave Vellante

>> Wow. And it's growing in deep double digits.

KJ Joshi

>> We're talking 30% to 35% a year.

Dave Vellante

>> So what's happening at re:Invent with you guys?

KJ Joshi

>> Super exciting times. We've had several conversations across a variety of partnerships. So we recently launched a couple of our services on AWS Marketplace, so a lot of conversations around that. We have also been advancing our discussions for our 50th upcoming location for Direct Connect. I won't be able to announce it now, but watch this space. We are at 49 already and some really active discussions around our 50th location with AWS globally.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay, so a couple of things in the marketplace, IPWAN and Fabric Cloud Router, can we get into those a little bit? Explain what they are, why they're relevant to customers.

KJ Joshi

>> So Fabric Cloud Router is our level three software-based connectivity platform, which essentially allows enterprises to connect multiple clouds. And IPWAN is another backbone application that allows customers to connect across different regions. So let me explain this a little bit more. So Fabric Cloud Router, if a customer is looking at connecting Oracle OCI databases to AWS, then they can use Fabric Cloud Router in the same location. Now if they want to connect two different regions, say Microsoft Azure in US West to AWS US East, they will be using IPWAN. So both these offerings are now generally available on AWS marketplace.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. And so this is a cross cloud, multi cloud?

KJ Joshi

>> That is correct.

Dave Vellante

>> We call it super cloud. We had fun with that several years ago, we kind of coined this term super cloud. But we saw that these clouds were coming together, people wanted to connect them, they didn't want to move, rip stuff out of one cloud and put it all in multiple clouds. And so you're the sort of fabric to enable that.

KJ Joshi

>> We are the network for the cloud. So we really are the backbone for the cloud. We have over 40% market share of all cloud ramps. So when you look at all the hyper scalers, we have more than 40% market share of their on ramps. The other thing that's changing from a definition perspective is what we call hybrid cloud. So earlier hybrid cloud used to be considered as basically, I have something on prem, and then I have something in the cloud. Now we are talking about connecting the two of them and actually doing partial workloads in the public cloud, but also keeping your data with yourself. So those are some of the use cases that are emerging. When we talk about multi cloud, earlier it used to be I have some applications sitting in Azure, some applications sitting in AWS, but now we are talking about actually connecting the two of them and leveraging them across different platforms. So the definition of multi cloud is evolving.

Dave Vellante

>> Are you saying that, and you're absolutely right. Initially multi cloud was, I have some stuff in this cloud and some stuff in that cloud and they never talked to each other. And then we've seen, we've actually featured firms like Walmart and Uber who are actually, their applications and their developer experience are spanning multiple clouds. That's kind of how we came up with the super cloud concept. And so that's what you're talking about. The logic is actually spanning multiple clouds. Data might be in one cloud, but the workloads in another cloud and those two need to come together.

KJ Joshi

>> And not too long ago at Oracle Open World, we actually had Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS was on the stage.

Dave Vellante

>> I was there.

KJ Joshi

>> With Larry. And that would not have been a thought four years ago. And now we are talking about customers really talking about leaving their database with Oracle but having it managed, or analyzed, or using AWS tools. And so I think that, the whole concept of keeping the existing workloads in whatever cloud they're in, but leveraging other cloud tools, that's a really brand new concept.

Dave Vellante

>> So Ellison is just amazing. He's just so vibrant and engaged and he declared, as you recall, "The era of multi-cloud has begun." And Oracle, they actually have a killer multi-cloud strategy. And it was kind of tongue-in-cheek in a way as a listener because as you say we've been talking about multi-cloud forever. However, as you just defined it, that is actually new. And Oracle was one of the earliest to do it. They started with Azure and now finally the border war with AWS ended and now it was all love-fest with Matt Garman, which like you said several years ago you never would've seen that. So that was a big win for customers, wasn't it?

KJ Joshi

>> Indeed. Because a lot of enterprise workloads are sitting either with Microsoft or with Oracle. And now having the ability to leverage Google or AWS, but still keeping those workloads in Microsoft or Oracle, that's an amazing win for customers.

Dave Vellante

>> So they're actually putting infrastructure like Rack in the clouds. Now, where do you fit? They'll do that as well in Equinix location, correct?

KJ Joshi

>> Indeed. So we have a two-pronged strategy. One is there are many workloads that are either not cloud-ready now, or there's a lot of rewriting, re factorization that needs to be done. And in those instances, the customers that are getting out of their legacy data centers, they want to park those workloads somewhere. So what they're doing is they leave it at Equinix. So the true hybrid cloud scenario where part of the workloads sit in a co-location facility and a part of the workloads are in public cloud. The second scenario where we are very critical is actually connectivity. So we are the backbone or the network for the clouds. So when a customer wants to connect and access AWS region, Equinix happens to be that connectivity platform for that. As I mentioned earlier, we have over 40% market share of all the cloud on-ramps globally. So we are one, an interconnection platform for the clouds, and for hybrid cloud, we are basically a home for parking your workloads when enterprises are exiting their existing data centers.

Dave Vellante

>> Last night we were at an event, we saw James Hamilton, we were chatting with him, and he always gives a master class whenever you talk to James Hamilton. He was talking about the importance of networking and connectivity, and he was saying at the scale of AWS that we are today, you've got to get networking, right. Because if you don't get networking, you spend so much on, and you're basically are saying waste, he didn't use that term, but you waste a lot of money on other resources that you need to accommodate the deficiencies of an inefficient network.

KJ Joshi

>> Indeed.

Dave Vellante

>> So I'm presuming, I'm inferring, the reason why you have 40% market share is because you have a very efficient and cost-effective network, and that has downstream effects. Is that an accurate premise and can you sort of educate us a little bit?

KJ Joshi

>> Absolutely. So there are two elements to it. The first element is the physics aspect. So we have a very distributed footprint. We have over 274 data centers worldwide. And so that allows us to have POPs, points of presence worldwide for our customers to connect. We have a very strong backbone network that connects all of these data centers. On top of that, we've enabled a lot of software capabilities that make networking very easy for customers. It's all done through our portal, it's pay as you go, and it's extremely easy to activate. It takes minutes to actually activate a connection to a Service Now or an AWS console. And so I think the idea of having one highly distributed footprint, very well connected through a backbone network and third, adding the software layer on top has really made us that very differentiated offer.

Dave Vellante

>> Now we've said for many years now that the definition of cloud is expanding and we've talked about multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, obviously on-prem is still a thing. Sovereign cloud is a big thing as well. You also have relationships with those members of the ecosystem, the Dells, the HPEs, IBM, NVIDIA. Talk about how they fit into the overall strategy and connect into this redefined cloud world.

KJ Joshi

>> So a couple of things. As I mentioned earlier, in the hybrid cloud world, a lot of hardware needs to be parked somewhere. While AWS has its own offering called Outpost, a lot of enterprise customers want to be somewhat independent. They want to have the hardware sitting somewhere else in a co-location facility. So Dell has an offering called Apex. HPE has an offering called GreenLake. Those offers are really ideal for a hybrid cloud environment. We also have partners like NVIDIA that are launching DGX, which is an Azure service offering. And so we are a DGX certified partner for NVIDIA. And so there are all of these partners. They form an ecosystem of service options for an enterprise, so that you're not limited to just four public cloud options. You have options to create something on your own and build your own private AI factory or a cloud solution. To your point around safety, security, sovereignty, a lot of customers are wanting to maintain control. So it's a balance. Some workloads belong in public, some workloads belong in their own environment and that's where having partnerships with Dell, HPE or NVIDIA really matters.

Dave Vellante

>> And that's what these worlds are coming together and AWS has its on-prem offering in local zones with Outposts, which I presume can fit into your-

KJ Joshi

>> Correct. So we are also AWS' largest Outpost partner, and we have the most number of Outpost deployments at Equinix for AWS.

Dave Vellante

>> I want to ask you about energy. It's obviously a hot topic, I was listening to a little bit of some of the conversations on TV today. Energy keeps coming up as a potential blocker to the AI wave. Maybe it's a blind spot, even though everybody's talking about it. How should we be thinking about energy, the increased requirements of energy, how are we going to accommodate that, and what do you see from your vantage point?

KJ Joshi

>> Great question. If anything, that bothers me from a growth perspective for the industry and for us, it's actually availability of power. Power is the new goal in oil to be honest. And availability of renewable power is even a bigger constraint, because everybody's looking at sustainability goals. They want to have clean energy and clean power for these data center applications. So in the short term, building new power plants or relying on small modular reactors, which are the nuclear options are going to be difficult. It's going to be a five to seven year option. A lot of companies are looking at solar, they're looking at geothermal. A lot of companies are also looking at battery backup units. So that would be something that will allow power management in the evenings when you're not able to use solar. And how you optimally use renewable resources in the short term is going to be an interesting challenge. Companies are looking at using gas or natural gas, but that is something that's not truly green. Over the next two to three years, there are certainly some power constraints and companies are getting creative around what they can use from a grid perspective, from a gas generation perspective, etc. But over the long term I'm very optimistic we are going to find three or four different options. You may have heard of a company called Fervo Energy. They've done a deal with Google for geothermal, where they're looking at generating about 1.2 gigawatts of geothermal power and it's completely renewable. We are also looking at very large solar plants. Recently Saudi Arabia has built almost a 1.3 gigawatt solar plant in Saudi Arabia and they're looking at doing a lot of AI work in Saudi Arabia and NEOM. Third area is around nuclear. A lot of new technologies are evolving. It's going to be somewhat regulated. It's not going to be easy to put a nuclear reactor in your backyard. So I know a lot of regulatory concerns are there around nuclear, but long-term it's actually a lot cleaner and it's a lot more viable solution for our data center industry. Over the next five to seven years I'm very optimistic that we'll have a viable nuclear solution as well.

Dave Vellante

>> So you've got the five to seven year timeframe. So the regulatory constraints are a headwind. Am I correct that there are some regions of the world that are further ahead in nuclear? The US is behind I think, but there are places, I think China, France, maybe Japan.

KJ Joshi

>> France is, so in fact UK is getting a lot of its power from France and it's nuclear. It's a mix. So in the UK they use natural gas and nuclear, nuclear comes from France. So you're correct, some markets are ahead in terms of nuclear, some markets are ahead in terms of renewable, like geothermal. So for example, you're looking at Iceland, you're looking at Nordic countries, they have a lot of wind and they're exporting power down to central Europe. So there's certainly some really emerging markets for renewable powers for data centers. And today the constraints around putting data centers in tier one markets like New York or Silicon Valley, they're going away. People are looking at Midwest, people are looking at putting them in Canada, in Calgary where there's more power available. So I think the market is shifting away from tier one to tier two, tier three markets.

Dave Vellante

>> And hydro?

KJ Joshi

>> Hydro is... Again building a hydro dam and a hydroelectric power is a seven to 10 year project. It's not easy. It's a really long-term solution.

Dave Vellante

>> So it sounds like, I feel like T. Boone Pickens, this isn't all of the above thing.

KJ Joshi

>> It is.

Dave Vellante

>> Because the requirements are so massive, you're going to have to attack this from multiple prongs.

KJ Joshi

>> Indeed, all the projections we are seeing, we are looking at anywhere from 30% to 40% CAGR in terms of power needs over the next 20 years. And that's just not going to come from one source. We are going to have to look at a lot of different sources including geothermal, nuclear, gas generation, turbine and solar.

Dave Vellante

>> And what about liquid cooling? How does that play in? I mean you've got to cool the hot chips, it's not going to solve the energy problem, but it's going to actually allow these hot chips to work, right?

KJ Joshi

>> We are in an interesting transition phase right now. We are using a mix of what we call air cooled and liquid cooled. In many cases we are not transitioned completely over to liquid cooling and cooling even at a chip level. I think we are probably a year or two years away from that. In the near future, and when I say near, I'm looking at 24 to 36 months, I would fully anticipate a hundred KVA plus racks. They are going to need cooling at a chip level and we are going to have to redesign everything we build. So the actual physical real estate footprint is going to shrink, because we are going to have very high powered on city racks, but we are going to have to cool them at a chip level. The technology is evolving really fast. We are making significant investments in a liquid cooling area as a company, and watch this space. We're going to make some really cool innovations that we're going to be announcing in the coming year.

Dave Vellante

>> I got a tour in October, I think it was, no, it was in November, of a Dell AI lab and they were showing us exactly that. It was a hybrid liquid cooler, direct liquid cooling on the chip, but also using fans and it's software enabled to optimize and you had to put the earplugs in to go into... And then there was no hot aisle. The hot aisle was actually in the rack, which was kind of novel, I guess it was novel to me anyway.

KJ Joshi

>> I'm going to share the statistics, that you may not be familiar, but some of the newer high-power density racks, the noise levels that they create, it is equivalent to a jet engine. So you are sitting next to a jet engine and you could go deaf. So it's really loud. And so again, we have to really think about employee safety as well. They have to wear air protection and overall physical PPE to make sure that they remain protected due to prolonged exposure to these kind of noise levels.

Dave Vellante

>> KJ, the data center's booming and Equinix is at the heart of that boom. Really appreciate you coming on. Now, audience you should be aware that we've got a follow-up on this interview with Equinix. We're going to be doing something out of our Palo Alto studio, so look for that. Stay tuned. It's going to be bringing AWS and Equinix together, kind of a look back at what happened at re:Invent and what we can expect going forward. KJ, thanks so much for-

KJ Joshi

>> Thank you so much for having me and look forward to .

Dave Vellante

>> Great conversation, I really appreciate it.

KJ Joshi

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of re:Invent 2024. We'll be right back.