Learn About Equinix Metal

​What is Equinix Metal?

Equinix Metal™ is Equinix’s dedicated cloud offering that integrates compute, networking, and storage options in a bare-metal single-tenant on-demand server offering. When you deploy an Equinix Metal server or storage appliance, you get the hardware all to yourself.

Equinix Metal is available in 25+ metros globally.

Key Features

Q: How do I provision and manage my Equinix Metal infrastructure?

All Equinix Metal infrastructure including, but not limited to, servers, storage, VLANs, IP addresses, Virtual Connections, and Dedicated Ports can be provisioned from the Equinix Metal console at https://console.equinix.com/ or from the Equinix Metal API. We also have a CLI, and a selection of SDKs for Go, Python, and Java. Equinix maintains a Terraform provider that includes support for Equinix Metal.

Q: What hardware does Equinix Metal offer?

We offer servers and storage appliances.

Our Standard Server line-up forms the basis or our on-demand inventory and is the most widely available across all of our locations. They're general purpose and available in configurations to fit workloads with varying compute, memory, and storage needs. A table with our current line-up and specifications is available on our Standard Servers product page.

For use-cases that have stricter hardware and resource requirements, we also have a line of Workload Optimized servers that are customized with extra RAM, CPU, storage, or GPUs. These are available as reserved hardware for 12 or 36 month contracts. A table with our current optimized plans and specifications is available on our Workload Optimized product page.

For our storage offerings we have partnered with Pure Storage and NetApp to offer a variety of appliances with different performance and size options. Storage is available as reserved hardware; you order and specify the length of time the appliance will be attached to your Project, and it is billed on a monthly basis.

If you do not find a hardware configuration that meets your needs, we can customize for hardware requirements that are not listed. Ask your dedicated account manager or reach out to sales for more information.

Q: What are my options for Operating Systems and Virtualization on Equinix Metal servers?

Equinix Metal provides a variety of open-source Linux operating system images, provisionable on our servers through the console or API, including: AlmaLinux, Alpine Linux, Debian, Flatcar Linux, FreeBSD, Rocky Linux, Talos, and Ubuntu.

We also offer licensed versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server, and VyOS. License fees are included in your monthly Equinix Metal invoice.

VMware ESXi is available on a bring-your-own license model where you are responsible for bringing your own valid VMware license(s), and for complying with all of VMware’s and any other vendor’s appropriate and applicable licensing and product terms.

Nutanix is available on select workload optimized servers. To provision and use Nutanix products on Equinix Metal, you will need to supply your own Nutanix license and make a hardware reservation for the servers.

A server and OS compatibility matrix is available on the OS Compatibility page.

Our OS images are kept as close as the upstream publishers as possible, while still being compatible with our hardware. Updates and kernel versions of our images are published over in equinixmetal-images/changelog. When you provision a server with one of our images it gets the newest published image.

If one of our Operating Systems does not meet your needs, we offer support for custom iPXE provisioning, so you can bring-your-own-OS to our platform.

Networking

Q: Does Equinix Metal support BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)?

Yes. Equinix Metal supports Local BGP for advertising routes for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to your Equinix Metal servers. You can also bring your own publicly routable IPv4 or IPv6 address range and advertise it to Equinix Metal using Global BGP.

Q: Does Equinix Metal support private networking?

Yes. Equinix Metal supports a variety of Layer 2 modes and connecting your servers and storage appliances on Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs). Find more information on our Layer 2 Overview documentation.

Q: Can I connect with public cloud providers on Equinix Metal?

Yes. Your Equinix Metal infrastructure can connect with other parties such as public cloud providers and network service providers. This can be done over the public Internet or through private networking via Interconnections.

Q: Does Equinix Metal support 100G Fabric Connections?

Yes. Dedicated Ports support 100G. A capacity check is required to confirm availability of 100G Fabric ports.

Q: Can I connect to my own co-located infrastructure from Equinix Metal?

Yes. Using Dedicated Ports you can connect to your own colocation cages in Equinix.

Q: Does Equinix Metal support LAG (Link Aggregation Groups) for Dedicated Connections?

No. We do not support LAG for Dedicated Fabric Connections. Options are 10G and 100G.

Use Cases and Solutions

Q: What are some use cases for Equinix Metal?

Foundational Layer - Equinix Metal can serve as a hardware layer to creating your own private cloud, supporting an IaaS layer or container cluster for various workloads using solutions like VMWare, OpenStack, Nutanix, KVM, K8, OpenShift.

High Performance Need - Your application has sustained, predictable performance requirements that can be satisfied by dedicated, single tenant, custom specialized hardware and most of the time without virtualization layer. HPC, Gaming, AI Big Data Analytics, and Finance applications are good fit.

Security & Isolation - You have trust, privacy, and/or regulatory mandates forcing a dedicated environment rather than shared multi-tenant environments.

Having Special Software - Maybe you have an application that works only on certain hardware due to needing certain features and capabilities like GPUs, security and encryption features, accelerator cards, or certain processing offloads, that are not provided over a virtualized environment. Having latency sensitive applications can also be considered part of this category. Examples are video transcoding, AR/VR, Telco workloads, and Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning applications.

Operational & Business - We're a good fit for short-term, high-performance processing requirements where OPEX (operational expense) and on demand features are necessary due to sudden demand spikes or seasonal business demands.

Connectivity & Ecosystem - You may need a variety of connectivity options and using Equinix Metal benefits such cases thanks to Equinix Fabric, Equinix Edge, Cross Connect, and Equinix Connect/ Internet Exchange. Examples include needing access and integration to cloud services with minimal latency for Cloud data offload/repatriation/backup. If you need edge compute near users to reduce latency or improve performance. Cross connect options to major security, data, and application platforms for pulling/pushing traffic like content/media distribution or transaction data processing. Internet and Fabric connectivity to major networks, Anycast IP, BYOIP best suited for Cloud PBX/voice, video unified communications for companies with global footprint.

Q: Does Equinix Metal offer managed solutions?

We have partnered with a variety of service providers and managed solutions companies to build an ecosystem of Customer Operated and Equinix Operated options for running your infrastructure on Equinix Metal. Our providers can also help you with running validated solutions for things such as storage, backups, firewalls, or disaster recovery.

Q: Do you offer support for start-ups?

Yes! We partner with start-up companies that align with Equinix Metal's goals and values, specifically in the areas of operating systems, networking, and cloud native related technology stacks. Please reach out to our Startup Program if you're interested in working with us.

Q: Do you offer support for open source projects?

Yes! We often rely on open source operating systems and infrastructure tools to keep our platform running, and we want to give back. Please reach out to our Open Source Program if you're interested in working with us.

Get Started

Q: How do I create an account on the Equinix Metal console?

To sign up and create an account, visit https://console.equinix.com/sign-up. We will ask for an email address and password to create your account, and we will ask you to create an Organization and Billing Account to get started. Please note, we do require credit card information when you sign up as a fraud prevention measure.

Q: Where can I learn about the basic navigation and functionality of the Equinix Metal console?

We have a guide to our console over in the Learning Center -- Introduction to the Equinix Metal Console. There's also a video demo available.

Q: How is Equinix Metal priced and billed?

On Demand servers are priced and billed on a usage basis, with a minimum usage block of one hour. We also offer a reserved hardware model, where servers and storage appliances are available on contract for a specific length of time. Reserving hardware unlocks discounts of 5% - 50% based upon term length. Dynamic usage and billing is available from the Spot Market for revocable resources.

Data Transfer traffic to the public internet is billed on a per GB usage basis, with bulk pricing available for high volume use cases with a commitment. Additional public IPv4 addresses are also available both at the Metro-level and Global Anycast on a per IP address basis.

All pricing information with current rates is available on the Equinix Metal Pricing page. Equinix Metal provides its own monthly invoicing for all of your usage, hardware reservations, and network usage. See the Billing Basics page for more information.

Support

Q: What are Equinix Metal’s support policies and SLAs?

Our Digital Support and Success Guide is a good starting place to read about our support and philosophy and policies. SLA information for Equinix Metal is in the Equinix Metal Product Policy.

Q: Where can I find contract Terms and Conditions?

Equinix Metal provides a Digital Services Agreement, which includes our Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy.

Q: What security and compliance standards does Equinix Metal support?

Equinix Metal provides details of our security measures and certifications about the platform on our security portal. Equinix also offers a searchable overview of the Certifications, Standards, and Compliance of the security of all our IBX® locations.

Q: Does Equinix Metal provide proactive monitoring of servers?

We do not monitor the health of server hardware while it is provisioned and in-use in your Project. You are responsible for monitoring device health while you are using it. We do check the health or drives and other hardware on deprovision. Equinix provides a document on our Shared Responsibility Model.