A service is created by combining ports into a service profile and then defining its characteristics and business rules.
You can get started with this basic work-flow:
Important: You can add ports in new or existing markets (for capacity), remove those ports, or upgrade and change certain aspects of your service throughout your service contract.
You can review and approve connection requests:
- manually through the portal
- automatically, using Equinix Fabric API, or
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In any case, the primary items that must be determined per connection request include:
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a valid authentication ID of the user who made request
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the local port where the users connection should be terminated, depending on your preference, fill factor, capacity management decisions, and other factors at your discretion
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the VLAN connection that should be mapped on your port
Note: Equinix Fabric can't begin provisioning and orchestration of the connection and can't consume any of the physical or logical resources until an approval.
Once the approval has been received, the entire work-flow occurs within seconds and the user is capable of sending traffic to your service within minutes.
Note: It is important that the provider makes clear instructions about the order of events to perform certain actions to their customers. Equinix can't customize guidance for every provider with a discrete, private interconnection offer.
To order connections, go to the Equinix Customer Portal.
Buyers and providers commonly use Dot1q type ports. However, some providers choose to use QinQ ports, if they offer more than one subscription service to their users. This allows their systems to identify an C-Tag as a single customer incoming on an aggregated port, and then the S-Tags that indicate the service for which it's bound.
Equinix Fabric offers the optional Enhanced Dot1q to QinQ Translation Support to assist the buyers to gather information from the provider in advance, and enter it into Equinix Fabric when creating a connection. This service allows a provider to name the services that a buyer will connect with. When the buyer creates a connection, the system will present them with these more familiar names in lieu of the S-Tag matching exercise.
Example: A provider might define Acme Cloud Storage and Acme Cloud Compute and Acme Cloud CRM as named services.
