Hyperconverged infrastructure specialist, Nutanix, has entered the fast growing market of edge computing for IoT, announcing general availability of Nutanix Xi IoT edge computing technology that integrates with the company’s just-announced Xi Cloud Services.
Xi Cloud Services is billed as “a new suite of offerings designed to create a more unified fabric across different cloud environments, that gives IT teams the freedom to run their applications on the optimal platform, not restricted by technology limitations.”
Xi IoT is one of five initial offerings on Xi Cloud Services, the others being:
Xi Leap, a native extension of the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform that provides disaster recovery as a service.
Xi Frame – a desktop-as-a-service platform;
Xi Beam – a multi-cloud cost optimisation and governance tool that is claimed to enable customers to reduce cost and enhance cloud security across platforms, public and private.
Xi Epoch – a monitoring tool for multi-cloud applications that provides a Google Maps-like view of applications to determine performance bottlenecks and availability issues in a cloud environment.
Nutanix says Xi IoT is able to analyse data locally and move the results to a customer’s public (Azure, AWS or Google) or private cloud platform for long-term analysis.
“Edge and core cloud deployments all operate on the same data and management plane, so Xi IoT customers have seamless, simplified insight into their deployment,” Nutanix says.
“Because Xi IoT provides zero-touch setup and management of edge devices, organisations can eliminate the risk of IoT security breaches due to human error, increase overall efficiency and reduce the cost of operating edge devices across the globe.”
Also, says Nutanix, organisations can manage all their edge locations through “a sophisticated infrastructure and application lifecycle management tool.”
Edge computing for IoT ‘flavour of the month’
Nutanix is just the latest company moving to exploit the fact growing edge computing market. Gartner estimates that, by 2022, some 75 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the traditional, centralised data centre or cloud, up from less than 10 percent in 2018.
In June this year Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announcing plans to invest $US4 billion in intelligent edge technologies and services over the next four years.
HPE said its $US4 billion investment would be “across a number of technology domains such as security, AI and machine learning, automation and edge computing” and that it intended to build out its portfolio of transformational advisory and professional services for the edge.”
Bruce Davie, vice president and chief technology officer, Asia Pacific and Japan for VMware, addressing VMware’s CIO Forum in Sydney earlier this year, ranked edge computing on par with IoT. He listed “Edge/IoT” along with the rise of mobile devices, cloud and AI in a list of “four super powers of technology” that “all interact and reinforce each other.”
And Fujitsu CTO Joseph Reger told the audience at the Sydney event in Fujitsu’s World Tour in June that edge computing would reload the opportunities for digital transformation.
“Intelligence is becoming distributed. The Internet of Things requires that we deal with that data in a more intelligent way than connecting all those devices and putting all the data into one gigantic database. That does not work,” he said.
