Edge computing is very much flavour of the month, driven by the need to avoid pumping masses of data generated by IoT devices all the way to distant data centres, and by the need to make rapid decisions based on IoT data and then act on those decisions.
IT vendors of all kinds are seeking out opportunities in this emerging market and developing products and marketing strategies to address it.
One very significant market will be for systems to house, power, cool and manage IT in environments very different to those found in today’s data centres, whether those data centres be on premises or in the cloud.
These products need to be self-contained, remotely manageable, sufficiently rugged for hostile environments and available in a wide-range of sizes and power capacities to meet the widely different demands of different edge computing applications.
In short, for established suppliers of data centre infrastructure such as Schneider Electric the edge represents a massive opportunity.
Hence the company invited 70 journalists from as far afield as Russia and South Africa to its ‘Life at the Edge’ event in Singapore earlier this month to talk about all things edge and what it has to offer for this emerging market.
What edge computing needs
Dave Johnson, executive vice president of Schneider Electric’s Secure Power division, summed up the nature of the market opportunity, saying “To simplify deployment at the edge and really make this work we need three things. We need integrated systems, we need cloud-based management tools and we need an ecosystem of partners.”
He continued: “As our customers move to the edge. We think Schneider is very well positioned to help. We’ve got some really powerful tools to help customers get going as we have historically done this in the data centre. We have hundreds of white papers to help our customers we have reference designs and configuration tools to develop solutions for the edge.”
Much of the day and a half event was, of course, about what Schneider Electric has to offer for edge computing, and I’ll have something to say about that in another piece.
How IDC sees the edge
Meanwhile Glen Duncan, who leads IDC’s data centre infrastructure practice in IDC in Asia Pacific, set the scene with a presentation detailing IDC’s views on the edge computing market, backed up with findings from some recent IDC surveys.
He argued that the rise in edge computing is one manifestation of convergence that is impacting every facet of IT, driven in large part by the huge population of smartphones and the demands they place on the network and the cloud in order to support all the applications that smartphones offer.
“IDC is seeing the convergence of IT technologies pretty much across the entire stack,” he said. “In the infrastructure space, when it comes to compute, storage and networking and hypervisor, you now have data centres in a box with hyperconverged appliances. That’s convergence within the IP stack.
“You now have operational technology players looking to converge the IT environment in response to IoT at the edge with the IP stack. So you got IT and OT converging, IT itself converging and, with the advent of software-defined wide area and local networks, the telco vendors, and guys interested in networks are converging network infrastructure stack and converting that into IP.”
Four flavours of edge computing
Duncan argued that providing and managing digital services at the edge will become a major role for many IT departments and organisations, so responsibility for the edge will be taken over by IT departments. He then went on to define four different flavours of edge computing.
“The first is the packaged endpoint with a small amount of compute that is close to the sensor, but it is not the sensor, and it has some basic level of computing, maybe for routing or basic decision making.
“Then we see a light edge which are low power computing platforms for specific functions such as control, data acquisition and transfer and basic analytics. These are probably PC level or below grade.
“Then there is the heavy edge, integrated computing platforms, often data centre grade. IDC also refers to these as ‘distributed core’.”
Duncan followed this with some data from IDC surveys showing take of up edge computing. IDC conducted an enterprise data centre survey in 2018, interviewing 1150 executives in the region Sixty percent said they had no edge computing strategy. This, Duncan said reflected the immaturity of the edge computing market.
Reasons for edge deployment
Others cited reasons for deploying as being improved security (20 percent), content delivery at the edge (14 percent) data processing at the edge (14 percent), proximity to point of transaction being captured (11 percent) and richer media experience of the end user (10 percent).
According to IDC’s 2019 worldwide data centre predictions, by 2022, 40 percent of enterprises will have doubled their spending on IT assets in edge locations and nearby colocation facilities instead of using core data centres to deliver digital services to local users and things.
These figures, Duncan said, reflected the need to provide customer experience at the edge to support IoT and digital transformation, and he also argued that reports of the decline of on-premises data centres were not correct.
“The truth is that we are moving to a multicloud environment, where everything is going to have a role, and everything is going to be significant and every part of the environment is experiencing growth.”
Infrastructure everywhere
In IDC’s 2018 global IoT decisionmaker survey 54 percent of respondents said that they planned to build more data centres at the edge. Another 50 percent said that they would deploy infrastructure close to where their sensors are and 47 percent said they would use a colocation provider. Another 25 percent said they would start looking at prefabricated or containerised data centres.
“Essentially, organisations are pushing forward with new data centres, new data centre equipment and running it themselves. They’ll be building it; they’ll be deploying it and in certain cases that leasing it,” Duncan said.
And he argued reports of the decline of on-premises data centres were not correct. “The truth is that we are moving to a multicloud environment, where everything is going to have a role, and everything is going to be significant and every part of the environment is experiencing growth.”
The challenge of growth
This growth, he said would bring considerable challenge. “Most enterprise will need to engage with a number of partners, not just to support the multicloud environment, which they struggle to do at the moment, because it’s extremely complex, but in particular, to support what’s going on at the edge.
“They will require support migrating the planning process from core cloud and edge and what goes where and how to configure an architecture.
“The big one is going to be around how they manage and monitor the resource usage and optimisation of those systems. … And whilst the vendor services are coming through the environment is getting more and more sophisticated Everyone is playing catch up, everyone is being pushed by forces that are very dynamic.”
Duncan saw a key role for managed service providers and smart infrastructure. “You’ll start to see much more talk around autonomous, smart, intelligent infrastructure that supports everything that’s going on, not just in the multi cloud environment but what’s going on at the edge.”
Schneider’s answer is Ecostuxure IT, its cloud based management solution, deployed through service partners. It was very much the focus of the event.
Schneider’s Dave Johnson said: “To simplify deployment at the edge, to really make this work we need integrated systems, we need cloud-based management tools and we need an ecosystem of partners. … “We have thousands of partners trained [in Ecostuxure IT]. We have 7000 professional field service experts ourselves, and we have these centres that we call service bureaus that are helping Schneider manage customer sites as well. … We have over 2500 connected customers, and we’re managing more than half a million data points today.”
I attended Schneider Electric’s Life on the Edge press event in Singapore as a guest of the company.
