Equinix Metal is Going Away: Here’s What You Can Do
By Rob Parker, Interconnection Director
Equinix has sunset its Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS), Equinix Metal, for 2026. Here’s how you can prepare for a smooth transition.
Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS) gives network teams the flexibility to spin up the server power they need, with the operating system they prefer, without heavy capex or long setup times. But as Equinix prepares to discontinue its offering on June 30, 2026, organizations that have been relying on Equinix Metal for their BMaaS need to prepare for migration.
Equinix has assured the reliability of Equinix Metal until its discontinuation, so you have time to plan next steps. Plus, according to Equinix, “For current Metal customers under contract, as your contract ends, we’ll offer a flexible month-to-month option to give you additional time to find an alternative or migrate workloads.”
If this change impacts you, here’s how you can prepare for a smooth transition.
Considerations before migrating
Before you move your workloads to another provider or setup, consider what features you should prioritize in line with your organization’s long-term plans.
Cost
As performance pressures grow and budgets shrink, cost is key when evaluating bare metal services. Smaller bare metal providers offer highly competitive pricing and are worth considering.
Many enterprises are introducing these smaller service providers into their network alongside hyperscalers, using best-of-breed features across different use cases to make their network more cost-effective.
Modularity
A modular architecture makes it easier to move workloads without redesigning your network each time. Look for platforms that integrate cleanly with your existing tools, support automation and standard APIs, and allow you to make changes on demand. These features reduce migration risk now and avoid lock-in later as your environment evolves.
Performance
If you manage latency-sensitive or high-throughput workloads, stick with providers that deliver reliable single-tenant performance. Network managers should also consider proximity to users, clouds, and data sources, as well as performance for east–west traffic. Performance predictability matters as much as peak specs during and after migration.
Support
Migrating your workloads can often expose gaps in operational support. Look for providers that offer responsive, 24/7 support, clear SLAs, and virtual provisioning and management. Strong support also reduces downtime risk when workloads are transiting or scaling.
Scalability
Consider how easily you can add, resize, or retire servers as requirements change. Network managers should assess time to deploy, available capacity across different locations, and whether scaling compute also requires reworking network design. The right platform allows you to scale on-demand without adding complexity.
Choosing an alternative to Equinix Metal
If you need to migrate from Equinix Metal, there are three types of services that can serve a similar function, depending on your priorities.
Bare metal
This will be the natural transition from Equinix Metal for most businesses. Bare metal platforms allocate dedicated hardware to each customer, available immediately and under their full control – but without the risk of physically managing that hardware or owning the DC space, connectivity, and other add-ons. Most services charge either hourly or monthly.
Cloud compute
Services like AWS EC2 and Digital Ocean are delivered as virtual machines on shared infrastructure, allowing for rapid scaling and flexibility with features like auto-scaling and managed services, while still offering customer-specific resource allocations. Again, most services charge either hourly or monthly.
Do it yourself
Technically, you have the option to deploy your own physical hardware in a data center. But unless you’re a major enterprise running huge data workloads, this option will be too expensive, time-consuming, and laborious to be worth considering.
How to choose the right alternative
For most situations, bare metal will be the perfect landing point from Equinix Metal, giving you benefits of both the cloud and your own data center space.
When reviewing providers, consider the following:
- Pricing: What does the provider charge, and what terms are available?
- Access: Does the provider allow access to the CSPs and other network services you need now and in the future?
- Geography: Where are the provider’s physical locations? Are they close to the consumer where necessary?
- Reliability: Does the provider offer robust uptime guarantees, redundancy, and disaster recovery options?
- Scalability: How much bandwidth do you have to work with, and how quickly can you change it?
How to migrate data from Equinix Metal
Migrating from Equinix Metal is a customer-specific process, but the general steps are typically as follows:
- Clone your hardware environment: Create a duplicate of your current environment with the support of providers like Megaport/Latitude.
- Establish connectivity: Deploy the necessary connectivity between your Equinix Metal environment and your new setup. Depending on your existing environment, this could be via Direct Connect through a cloud service provider/Megaport, or via VPN tunnel across the internet (or a more secure option like Megaport’s IPsec tunnel support on MCR).
- Migrate your applications and data: Transfer your workloads, applications, and data to the new environment.
- Decommission the legacy Equinix Metal platform: Once the migration is complete and verified, you can tear down your old Equinix Metal setup. Don’t forget that Equinix Metal contract holders can pay month-to-month after the decommission date if more time is needed to make the switch.
If you want a personalized migration plan or support picking the best setup for your organization, chat with our friendly team.
Bare metal and software-defined networking
When you use Network as a Service (NaaS) alongside your bare metal solution, you protect your workloads with flexible, private, high-performance connections while supporting a modular IT architecture.
If you’re moving from Equinix Metal, Latitude.sh offers a dedicated migration solution that helps you transition smoothly while saving significant time and costs. Latitude’s Equinix Metal migration plan handles the heavy lifting, so you can focus on running your workloads rather than managing the move.
With the recent acquisition of Latitude.sh, Megaport now offers bare metal compute via Latitude alongside its global Network as a Service (NaaS) platform. This gives customers the benefits of bare metal with the added flexibility, speed, and connectivity of Megaport’s ecosystem.
Network managers can use Megaport to:
- connect bare metal workloads to clouds, data centers, and SaaS platforms via private, high-performance links – all in under 60 seconds
- combine network connectivity with bare metal workloads
- access a highly redundant network of over 1,000 locations across 26 countries
- provision connections and compute on-demand via an intuitive portal or APIs
- scale infrastructure on demand – no long-term lock-in or network redesigns needed.
For AI and data-intensive environments, there’s also Megaport AI Exchange (AIx): a growing ecosystem that simplifies private connectivity between storage and compute, GPU providers, and third-party AI models and services. Use AIx to incorporate your bare metal setup into your AI architecture without compromising performance or security.
By decoupling your compute from your network with the ability to integrate as required, you can grow your infrastructure on your terms.
