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Location Diversity and Resilience

Equinix Metal™ relies on you to provision and configure your servers in a way that provides the right level of redundancy, capacity, backups, and disaster recovery planning for your use-case.

We recommend provisioning servers in a redundant fashion, and also have general guidelines for where those servers are located to provide a resilient architecture.

Rack-level Diversity

When planning for resilience, Equinix Metal deploys a pair of switches per rack so individual racks do not have a single point of failure. Depending on a variety of factors — including the size of each of our global facilities — servers may be available in multiple racks. For further redundancy within a data center, you may want to spread your servers over multiple racks.

Although users are not able to query rack information in advance of a deploy, we do provide a Switch ID hash (in the Portal or via our API) as part of the details for any already-deployed instance. Each Switch ID hash represents a switch pair, which allows you to understand the diversity of your infrastructure.

If you are looking to achieve a certain diversity (or concentration) of infrastructure, these are your options:

  • If you are provisioning on-demand servers, you can destroy and then provision another available server to achieve a particular setup. We cannot always provide the diversity.
  • If you are using Reserved Servers, you can request diverse rack placement, and we can work with you to provide the required setup, pending availability.

IBX-level Diversity

When you provision infrastructure on Equinix Metal, you generally choose the Metro where it lives. When you provision servers, they might land in different IBXs in a metro. Equinix Metal does not offer guarantees for IBX-level diversity; this does not provide additional resiliency to your deployments.

Some IBXs in a Metro have very close physical foot prints. Local redundancy in these facilities does not protect against disasters and outages that can take out infrastructure at a location for an extended period of time or that affects multiple IBXs in a Metro.

In order to get true location-based resiliency, you have to consider deployments that include multiple Metros.

Metro-level Diversity

Provisioning redundant infrastructure across one or more Metros provides resilience against individual device failures and larger incidents that can affect an entire Metro or the Equinix Metal network within a Metro.

Equinix Metal and greater Equinix offer many features to help you architect geo-resilient infrastructure appropriate for your use-case, such as:

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