Introducing ServiceFabric™: Fulfilling our manifesto

Alex Marcham, Sr Director, Product Strategy
June 30, 2022

Today, we are announcing the market introduction of ServiceFabric™ Connect globally. This is the first service delivered by our newly developed global service orchestration platform, ServiceFabric™, across NA, EMEA and APAC.

In our Industry Manifesto, Enabling Connected Data Communities, we outlined how Digital Realty® will play a central role in interconnecting global communities with what is increasingly their most strategic asset – their data. To do this, our existing products and capabilities will evolve to ensure that our customers have industry-leading tools at their disposal to keep pace with their own changing IT needs.

ServiceFabric™ is a huge step forward in enabling this vision. This new global service orchestration platform, developed in-house at Digital Realty®, allows us to provide a new level of service to our worldwide customer base. ServiceFabric™ can pull together network connectivity service elements from multiple sources, including those from Digital Realty® and our partners, to create the end-to-end service combinations customers need to fulfill their technology needs, supporting their business goals.

ServiceFabric™ underpins many of the capabilities of PlatformDIGITAL® with its new service orchestration capabilities, allowing our customers to easily provision global connectivity and orchestrate connected services across our worldwide data center footprint. This enables our customers to create workflows that connect centers of data exchange, accessing the data communities that our customers care about. ServiceFabric™ allows us to provide a new generation of global and virtual distributed network and data-centric services.

The initial service capabilities delivered by ServiceFabric™ are focused on network connectivity services. These services are referred to as ServiceFabric™ Connect, and include the following initial capabilities:

• Global Layer 2 virtual connectivity to your hybrid IT infrastructure and cloud partners
• Global Layer 3 virtual connectivity to your hybrid IT infrastructure
• Virtual Router based connectivity to your hybrid IT infrastructure and cloud partners

These virtual network services are supported by Digital Realty’s leading physical interconnection and virtualized connectivity products, providing our customers with a true end-to-end global inter-connectivity solution with the scale and consistency of our existing interconnect, cross connect and network services capabilities, combined with the flexibility and power of virtual services on our new service orchestration platform.

Our ServiceFabric™ platform is designed from the ground up to support the future integration of a wide variety of partners. We have integrated capabilities from Digital Realty® and Megaport™ today, with many more to come in the future. The open ecosystem and flexible architecture are well aligned to our position in the industry as the enabler of the only truly open fabric of fabrics, where each customer’s experience is enhanced by each integrated partner. ServiceFabric™ is therefore dedicated to being open and is being rolled out with partners who are open.

ServiceFabric™ Connect is more than a software defined network (SDN) offering; we have deployed our platform physically across our distributed global footprint and connected each deployment with a new backbone network. This network and our orchestration platform are designed to use the best available network connectivity to fulfill the connectivity needs of ServiceFabric™ customers and will evolve in time to provide increased value to our customers.

We are making a huge leap along the path we set out in our Industry Manifesto with the launch of ServiceFabric™ Connect: the ability for our customers to orchestrate a variety of services from Digital Realty® and our partners in one place, solving for both their physical and virtual infrastructure needs in a single platform, allows those same customers to unlock significant data value that is currently trapped.

ServiceFabric™ is generally available today with market introduction in select facilities across our global footprint, with its reach initially spanning North America, Europe and Asia, with 61 supported sites across 32 metro markets.

Look to hear more in the coming weeks with our upcoming market launch.

For more information on ServiceFabric™ & ServiceFabric™ Connect, please contact your local Digital Realty account representative.