Define Your Services
Define the services you want to offer over Equinix Fabric and the locations these services will be offered. Determine any initial costs and how best to maximize your investment.
Service Profiles
Any Equinix Fabric customer who has access to one or more Fabric ports or virtual devices can become a service provider on Fabric. You can make your services available publicly by creating a service profile. For information about creating service profiles, see Create a Layer 2 Service Profile.
Service profiles define how you will represent your available services in the Equinix Customer portal as well as any other Equinix Fabric service provider search tool. Use the following guidelines when defining your service to Equinix Fabric:
- Service should be familiar to your customers and have a website link that can be provided so customers can learn more.
- Service should be easy to describe and understand.
- You can offer one or more services across one or many service profiles, but we recommend that you maintain a one service to one profile relationship.
Any new public service profile requires internal Equinix approval and are not available immediately after creation. Allow at least five days for approval provided all required information is available.
Locations and Charges
Equinix Fabric service providers may offer customers both local and remote connectivity.
- Local – If you choose local connectivity, any metro where you have a physical presence and connectivity to Equinix Fabric where other customers in that same metro can locally connect to your services. Customers with standard Equinix Fabric ports or other virtual assets such as routers or firewalls will pay a local connection charge to connect privately to your service.
- Remote – If you choose remote connectivity, any Equinix Fabric customer in any location may connect to your services, whether they reside in the local metro or another remote metro. Customers with either standard or unlimited ports will pay a remote connection charge to your service when connecting remotely.
When you create a service profile, you can associate one or more Fabric ports to that profile. The metros where these ports reside are the Equinix metros where your service is locally available. All ports associate with a particular service profile must be of the same encapsulation type (.1q or QinQ). For more information about Equinix Fabric ports, see Ports.
Port Types
As a service provider on Equinix Fabric, you are enabling software-defined access to your services. Customers can create connections to or from your offered service on-demand within the Equinix Customer portal or using APIs.
The initiator of a request is the charging entity, so this should help determine whether you would like to deploy standard or unlimited ports. We typically recommend standard Equinix Fabric ports as you will not be charged for connections to your ports or service profiles. If you wish to originate connections from your Fabric ports, you may want to consider unlimited Equinix Fabric ports.
Available ports include .1q or QinQ ports. EPL ports are another option for non-aggregated, fully transparent connections to other partners or providers. For more information about the different port types, see Port Types.
Integration Teams and Collaboration Space (Optional)
As part of the initial stage of on-boarding, it’s helpful to enable collaboration between Equinix and your on-boarding team. You may work with your Equinix sales and technical contacts to set up a collaboration space (such as a Microsoft Teams channel) where you can comment, ask questions, and get real-time feedback. This has helped immensely to enable successful on-boarding for many service providers to date.