9 ms·

Equinix is acquiring Packet

143 points by jacobwg 7y ago

donalhunt 7y ago
Packet's blog post: https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/ https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/ This is probably a good play for Equinix as it provides a lower barrier to entry to a segment of the market that they typically haven't engaged (Packet being largely profitable probably helps). In addition, I believe Packet already had presence in a number of Equinix datacenters so "landlord buys tenant" comes to mind...
- shaklee3 7y ago
  How do you know they're profitable?
  - donalhunt 7y ago
    Assumption based on 1) their pricing model and 2) them being acquired by Equinix (who I consider quite conservative).
    - shaklee3 7y ago
      I believe their pricing model was cheaper than any of the major cloud providers for an equivalent compute and networking resources. Given that their margins are also lower due to the volumes, I wouldn't think that it's obvious that they were profitable just by their pricing model.
      - qaq 7y ago
        Their control plane is more simple
- dang 7y ago
  That's more readable, so we've changed the URL above to it from https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/123868/Equinix-to-Acquire-Bare-Metal-Leader-Packet/ https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/123868/Eq.... Thanks!
- gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
  Yeah, it feels like it has a lot of potential on paper, packet does a lot of stuff well that Equinix probably was thinking "why aren't we doing that? why isn't that us?" It feels like one of those cases where you really want that vision to survive at scale. Making it easier for Equinix to leverage its resources to get people cloud-y style capabilities that isn't attached at the hip to the other clouds sounds like it would be a pretty good thing. And for Equinix themselves, being able to expand their direct offerings without stepping directly on the toes of the other cloud giants that are also its customers is likely always a good thing in itself.
drej 7y ago
A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs. I guess my account got pwned. They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run instances without a valid card. They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues. I never heard from them again.
- Eikon 7y ago
  Packet is not doing virtualization.
  - RationPhantoms 7y ago
    No it's bare metal but can you not run your own virtualization software on the devices themselves?
    - shaklee3 7y ago
      I think the responder was questioning the phrase about packet asking about the customer VMs. You can certainly run VMs on top of bare metal, but packet doesn't know about that.
  - drej 7y ago
    Yeah, sorry, I mean VM as a bit of compute, regardless of its provisioning.
  - svd4anything 7y ago
    Exactly the story he has sounds fabricated. Maybe he is mixing providers up.
Eikon 7y ago
Packet’s offering are so good and so much above competition that it’s not even funny. I mean, why almost no one else is offering BGP ECMP, byoip, anycast routing, a sane setup system among others. It boggles my mind. It’s a hard sell going back to geoip and shitty layer2 switching that you get everywhere else after using their services.
- cimnine 7y ago
  Vultr has byoip via BGP: https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ You can also implement anycast with it. Feel free to use my affiliate link worth 50$ to you: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7965104-4F https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7965104-4F
  - q3k 7y ago
    Vultr's BGP is not very good though. I regularly lose the full Internet BGP table from them and have to ask support to fix it. Supposedly it's some sort of limit of their network infrastructure. Another day they just randomly stopped announcing my prefix to the Internet, and since they don't even have a looking glass it was impossible to debug without, again, asking their support.
- swyx 7y ago
  hi I'm a mere frontend developer who doesnt do much at the network layer - do you mind ELIFEDing to me what exactly Packet got right? What's the big deal about automated bare metal? is it somehow a lot faster? cheaper? than virtualization? Is Packet 100% for edge computing or is Equinix kinda repurposing it in this acquisition for its edge computing strategy? I feel like something that is so obvious to you is not obvious to me and it'd probably help other readers here to follow along. Thanks in advance
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    Here's the way I see it: there are a lot of customers who don't need all of the AWS services. They also would prefer to be running on bare metal for performance reasons, and to have slightly more control over their application. I know AWS with the nitro instances are closing that gap, but packet was around before they had those. Also, their provisioning software is excellent. From the time you choose to deploy, it takes only about 30 to 45 seconds for your instance to start. I know AWS is faster, but AWS isn't installing a new operating system each time. as the other posters pointed out, they have a lot of features that AWS will also not let you do, like bgp with ecmp. lastly, they tend to have newer types of instances that other providers don't that you can play around on. The cavium arm processor comes to mind, which I haven't seen on any of the major cloud providers.
q3k 7y ago
Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.
- hetspookjee 7y ago
  I didn't know how fast to turn around when I tried to register an account and they insisted I needed to provide a copy of my passport or drivers license. I don't know why I need to provide such information for a hosting provider as I've never had to do so before at any of their competitors. or perhaps you mean something else with open?
  - ianhawes 7y ago
    They obviously wanted to verify who you were which is why they requested a government issued photo ID. Good on them for being proactive about it instead of waiting until you had created a server. Could you imagine a production server being frozen while they wait for you to verify your identity? Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud, hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own name.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      > Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud, hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own name. All of those can get fake id scans for a couple of dollars each.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      An affidavit doesn't cost much and requires presenting government ID. There would be no fraud if affidavits were required.
  - chucky_z 7y ago
    When I worked for a web host the drivers license/passport was normal. It sounds weird but stops some fraction of scammers.
shaklee3 7y ago
It seems they are in the process of open sourcing their deployment software. Does anyone know how this affects that? The github repos are still empty.
walrus01 7y ago
Packet has to be the most impossible to google company name ever. Unless you google "packet + bare metal" or something.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  First result for me when I google "Packet". And has been for a year+....
pm90 7y ago
I was hoping for Packet to be the next big bare metal provider so this is kinda sad at first glance. I’ve heard great things about them but haven’t used them; I was considering them for a side project of spinning up my own k8s cluster just because. GCP and AWS probably fit the needs of most established businesses. I know quite a few startups that use bare metals though since they cost a lot less. Plus, you have complete visibility and control over your entire stack. I hope others spring up to address the market of users needing extremely highly customized systems at the lowest costs.
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  Packet’s pricing doesn’t seem worth it to me compared to GCP - looking at their list prices they seem to be priced just 20% less for compute (actually same if you get e2s) so unless I’m missing something seems like very niche offering...
  - DetectiveX 7y ago
    They also offer discount pricing for long term contracts and etc. But depends on your use case among other things on whether a long term commitment makes sense.
    - dilyevsky 7y ago
      Well so do every other cloud vendor ;) - committed use discount on gcp is 30%
      - DetectiveX 7y ago
        Depends of course peoples needs for cloud. Some people need the power of bare metal and that's why most cloud providers are moving to making that an option.
        dilyevsky 7y ago
        Probably mostly for marketing purposes (just to say they have it). Kvm/nitro penalty is within single percentage points these days so 99% of folks out there won’t even know the difference.
ksec 7y ago
So Equinx is stepping into Cloud Hosting? What makes Packet any difference to, Linode, DO, Upcloud, Vultr, Hivelocity, and many others? Where the first few are bringing Bare Metal to its offering along with Database aaS.
- ljsmith93 7y ago
  Equinix has long been in the cloud game. Most public clouds have at least some presence in their data centers or using their global network backbone. I do believe this is their first venture into direct to consumer cloud sales assuming they retain Packet's business model.
mmmBacon 7y ago
I wonder what the purchase price was. According to TechCrunch, Packet was valued at $100M and had raised $36M. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-...
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  With liquidation preferences, it would have to be at least $36M before the investors are fully repaid and the founders start seeing a single cent.
tsak 7y ago
Running Bullshit.js over the press release... https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png
- johnedwards 7y ago
  Bare Metal Bullshit Packet is going to be my EDM group's name
  - penagwin 7y ago
    Freaking awesome name for a red team too haha.
- Spivak 7y ago
  How is hybrid multicloud not flagged as BS?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
daxorid 7y ago
When IBM bought SoftLayer, it destroyed the value proposition of SoftLayer, and we had to move. Looks like we'll be shopping for a new provider, again.
senderista 7y ago
This is sad news. I used Packet for a benchmarking project (https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks) and was super impressed by the ease of use. Put EC2 absolutely to shame (and was much cheaper than EC2’s bare metal offering).
lovebigmacs 7y ago
I'm not sure that very many people understood what sort of spot pricing Packet had. I have rented so many hours of EPYC server time for $.25/hr in SJC1. Or a 96 core ARM machine for $.30/hr in Amsterdam. I had good luck with them and they were always responsive in their Slack. I was sad to see the news, anyway.
ablekh 7y ago
"When the transaction closes later this quarter, Packet will continue operating as before: same team, same platform, same vision. Our commitment to our customers ..." -- The question is how long before Equinix decides to change the status quo. I'm seeing it as yet another (after recent news on Visa's Plaid acquisition) blow to diversification and competition in the cloud and technology ecosystems. Generally, industry consolidation is IMO a scary thing ...

143 points by jacobwg 7y ago

Packet's blog post: https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/ https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/ This is probably a good play for Equinix as it provides a lower barrier to entry to a segment of the market that they typically haven't engaged (Packet being largely profitable probably helps). In addition, I believe Packet already had presence in a number of Equinix datacenters so "landlord buys tenant" comes to mind...

shaklee3 7y ago
How do you know they're profitable?
- donalhunt 7y ago
  Assumption based on 1) their pricing model and 2) them being acquired by Equinix (who I consider quite conservative).
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    I believe their pricing model was cheaper than any of the major cloud providers for an equivalent compute and networking resources. Given that their margins are also lower due to the volumes, I wouldn't think that it's obvious that they were profitable just by their pricing model.
    - qaq 7y ago
      Their control plane is more simple
dang 7y ago
That's more readable, so we've changed the URL above to it from https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/123868/Equinix-to-Acquire-Bare-Metal-Leader-Packet/ https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/123868/Eq.... Thanks!
gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
Yeah, it feels like it has a lot of potential on paper, packet does a lot of stuff well that Equinix probably was thinking "why aren't we doing that? why isn't that us?" It feels like one of those cases where you really want that vision to survive at scale. Making it easier for Equinix to leverage its resources to get people cloud-y style capabilities that isn't attached at the hip to the other clouds sounds like it would be a pretty good thing. And for Equinix themselves, being able to expand their direct offerings without stepping directly on the toes of the other cloud giants that are also its customers is likely always a good thing in itself.

drej 7y ago

A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs. I guess my account got pwned. They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run instances without a valid card. They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues. I never heard from them again.

Eikon 7y ago
Packet is not doing virtualization.
- RationPhantoms 7y ago
  No it's bare metal but can you not run your own virtualization software on the devices themselves?
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    I think the responder was questioning the phrase about packet asking about the customer VMs. You can certainly run VMs on top of bare metal, but packet doesn't know about that.
- drej 7y ago
  Yeah, sorry, I mean VM as a bit of compute, regardless of its provisioning.
- svd4anything 7y ago
  Exactly the story he has sounds fabricated. Maybe he is mixing providers up.

Eikon 7y ago

Packet’s offering are so good and so much above competition that it’s not even funny. I mean, why almost no one else is offering BGP ECMP, byoip, anycast routing, a sane setup system among others. It boggles my mind. It’s a hard sell going back to geoip and shitty layer2 switching that you get everywhere else after using their services.

cimnine 7y ago
Vultr has byoip via BGP: https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ You can also implement anycast with it. Feel free to use my affiliate link worth 50$ to you: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7965104-4F https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7965104-4F
- q3k 7y ago
  Vultr's BGP is not very good though. I regularly lose the full Internet BGP table from them and have to ask support to fix it. Supposedly it's some sort of limit of their network infrastructure. Another day they just randomly stopped announcing my prefix to the Internet, and since they don't even have a looking glass it was impossible to debug without, again, asking their support.
swyx 7y ago
hi I'm a mere frontend developer who doesnt do much at the network layer - do you mind ELIFEDing to me what exactly Packet got right? What's the big deal about automated bare metal? is it somehow a lot faster? cheaper? than virtualization? Is Packet 100% for edge computing or is Equinix kinda repurposing it in this acquisition for its edge computing strategy? I feel like something that is so obvious to you is not obvious to me and it'd probably help other readers here to follow along. Thanks in advance
- shaklee3 7y ago
  Here's the way I see it: there are a lot of customers who don't need all of the AWS services. They also would prefer to be running on bare metal for performance reasons, and to have slightly more control over their application. I know AWS with the nitro instances are closing that gap, but packet was around before they had those. Also, their provisioning software is excellent. From the time you choose to deploy, it takes only about 30 to 45 seconds for your instance to start. I know AWS is faster, but AWS isn't installing a new operating system each time. as the other posters pointed out, they have a lot of features that AWS will also not let you do, like bgp with ecmp. lastly, they tend to have newer types of instances that other providers don't that you can play around on. The cavium arm processor comes to mind, which I haven't seen on any of the major cloud providers.

q3k 7y ago

Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.

hetspookjee 7y ago
I didn't know how fast to turn around when I tried to register an account and they insisted I needed to provide a copy of my passport or drivers license. I don't know why I need to provide such information for a hosting provider as I've never had to do so before at any of their competitors. or perhaps you mean something else with open?
- ianhawes 7y ago
  They obviously wanted to verify who you were which is why they requested a government issued photo ID. Good on them for being proactive about it instead of waiting until you had created a server. Could you imagine a production server being frozen while they wait for you to verify your identity? Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud, hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own name.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    > Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud, hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own name. All of those can get fake id scans for a couple of dollars each.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    An affidavit doesn't cost much and requires presenting government ID. There would be no fraud if affidavits were required.
- chucky_z 7y ago
  When I worked for a web host the drivers license/passport was normal. It sounds weird but stops some fraction of scammers.

shaklee3 7y ago

It seems they are in the process of open sourcing their deployment software. Does anyone know how this affects that? The github repos are still empty.

walrus01 7y ago

Packet has to be the most impossible to google company name ever. Unless you google "packet + bare metal" or something.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
First result for me when I google "Packet". And has been for a year+....

pm90 7y ago

I was hoping for Packet to be the next big bare metal provider so this is kinda sad at first glance. I’ve heard great things about them but haven’t used them; I was considering them for a side project of spinning up my own k8s cluster just because. GCP and AWS probably fit the needs of most established businesses. I know quite a few startups that use bare metals though since they cost a lot less. Plus, you have complete visibility and control over your entire stack. I hope others spring up to address the market of users needing extremely highly customized systems at the lowest costs.

dilyevsky 7y ago
Packet’s pricing doesn’t seem worth it to me compared to GCP - looking at their list prices they seem to be priced just 20% less for compute (actually same if you get e2s) so unless I’m missing something seems like very niche offering...
- DetectiveX 7y ago
  They also offer discount pricing for long term contracts and etc. But depends on your use case among other things on whether a long term commitment makes sense.
  - dilyevsky 7y ago
    Well so do every other cloud vendor ;) - committed use discount on gcp is 30%
    - DetectiveX 7y ago
      Depends of course peoples needs for cloud. Some people need the power of bare metal and that's why most cloud providers are moving to making that an option.
      - dilyevsky 7y ago
        Probably mostly for marketing purposes (just to say they have it). Kvm/nitro penalty is within single percentage points these days so 99% of folks out there won’t even know the difference.

ksec 7y ago

So Equinx is stepping into Cloud Hosting? What makes Packet any difference to, Linode, DO, Upcloud, Vultr, Hivelocity, and many others? Where the first few are bringing Bare Metal to its offering along with Database aaS.

ljsmith93 7y ago
Equinix has long been in the cloud game. Most public clouds have at least some presence in their data centers or using their global network backbone. I do believe this is their first venture into direct to consumer cloud sales assuming they retain Packet's business model.

mmmBacon 7y ago

I wonder what the purchase price was. According to TechCrunch, Packet was valued at $100M and had raised $36M. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-...

Hydraulix989 7y ago
With liquidation preferences, it would have to be at least $36M before the investors are fully repaid and the founders start seeing a single cent.

tsak 7y ago

Running Bullshit.js over the press release... https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png

johnedwards 7y ago
Bare Metal Bullshit Packet is going to be my EDM group's name
- penagwin 7y ago
  Freaking awesome name for a red team too haha.
Spivak 7y ago
How is hybrid multicloud not flagged as BS?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

daxorid 7y ago

When IBM bought SoftLayer, it destroyed the value proposition of SoftLayer, and we had to move. Looks like we'll be shopping for a new provider, again.

senderista 7y ago

This is sad news. I used Packet for a benchmarking project (https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks) and was super impressed by the ease of use. Put EC2 absolutely to shame (and was much cheaper than EC2’s bare metal offering).

lovebigmacs 7y ago

I'm not sure that very many people understood what sort of spot pricing Packet had. I have rented so many hours of EPYC server time for $.25/hr in SJC1. Or a 96 core ARM machine for $.30/hr in Amsterdam. I had good luck with them and they were always responsive in their Slack. I was sad to see the news, anyway.

ablekh 7y ago

"When the transaction closes later this quarter, Packet will continue operating as before: same team, same platform, same vision. Our commitment to our customers ..." -- The question is how long before Equinix decides to change the status quo. I'm seeing it as yet another (after recent news on Visa's Plaid acquisition) blow to diversification and competition in the cloud and technology ecosystems. Generally, industry consolidation is IMO a scary thing ...