Equinix Working To Close Digital Divide And MInIO Reaches 1B Downloads

Today’s economy is supported and enabled by good digital connectivity. People to who don’t have access to good connectivity are at a significant disadvantage in their work, their education and their participation in modern social discussions. During the COVID pandemic, people who had good connectivity (and didn’t need to be physically in a location to do their work) were able to continue to work remotely and their children were able to continue their education remotely. Those without such connectivity did not have these options and suffered as a consequence.

Equinix, a major international co-location data center company, recently announced that it was committing and initial contribution of $50M to the Equinix Foundation, an employee-driven charitable organization working to advance digital inclusion through philanthropic grant making and strategic partnerships. In particular this foundation provides funding and volunteer support to organizations working to ensure equitable and inclusive access to technology, connectivity and education.

Employees will help identify and support its employees’ community-driven nonprofits and social enterprises dedicated to closing the digital divide locally and globally. The foundation is partnering with dozens of nonprofits organizations worldwide to address issues around digital inclusion. This includes increasing access to technology and connectivity as well as helping people to develop the skills needed to thrive in today’s world.

Some of the organizations that the foundation is partnering with include BigHope, a nonprofit in Texas that prepares elementary school children for STEAM opportunities. They also include CLAP-TECH that collaborates across education and industry partners in Hong Kong to prepare high school students for the future and World Pulse, an online social network led by women from more than 227 countries with a mission to lift and unite women’s voices to impact the world.

MinIO provides multi-cloud object storage and recently announced that it has surpassed one billion cumulative Docker downloads. The company says they have had as many as 1.3M Docker downloads in a day in 2022. MinIO provides a software defined S3 object store that runs on AWS, Google and Azure as well as private cloud deployments on Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, HPE Ezmeral and SUSE Rancher. It also runs on millions of colocation and edge deployments due to its lightweight code.

As a consequence of its capability to run in all these environments, MinIO says it is a major enabler of multi-cloud environments that allow organizations to keep their data and applications running on many clouds, rather than being tied to one vendor’s cloud. MinIO says that it is developer focused and cloud native. This has led to a valuation of the company at over $1B in a January funding round.

Equinix’s new employee-driven Foundation seeks to close the digital divide in the communities where its employees live and work. MinIO provides S3 object storage in major cloud storage providers all the way to the edge to enable multi-cloud environments and driving 1B downloads.