The Future of the Edge
Foresight is our ability to accurately predict future outcomes. When looking at the long-term view of the current digital revolution, it’s not hard to envision a world that is fundamentally different from today. We are only at the beginning of the global trends of IoT, artificial intelligence and the mountains of data it all generates. As more content is created to satisfy consumer’s demand for streaming video, virtual reality headsets and smart devices, faster networks and more data center capacity at different points in the distributed infrastructure grid will be required.
The demand for meeting tight latency budgets in order to provide an exceptional end user experience will also continue to increase. 5G networks sending commands to tens of thousands of central offices, macro towers and small cell never farther than a few miles from customers will enable practically latency-free real-time data activities such as drone collision avoidance and remote robotic surgery.
Open source technologies will also change the way data centers are designed and managed in a big way. Collaboration and communication between experts to come up with the best industry solutions and options will open the door to a new area of open source hardware development. By giving everyone early access to new designs, the entire industry will benefit from decreased time-to-market for new product offering and lower investment costs.
In a report titled “2018 Trends in Datacenters & Critical Infrastructure,” IT research and advisory company 451 Research predicts the modules market will continue to expand: “The way datacenter operators design and construct facilities is changing, with prefabricated and modular designs ascendant. This is being driven by a variety of factors, including the rapid pace of change in IT as well as an overall drive for efficiencies through standardization and industrialization. Prefabricated modular (PFM) approaches will shorten build times and result in lower-cost facilities supported by novel power and cooling systems.”
There has long been a belief that the cloud will outpace the traditional data center in the upcoming years. We predict that traditional data centers will always be needed. What will change is that as organizations put their attention on building edge facilities, easily deployable modular data centers at the edge serving as spokes to the traditional data center hub will act in concert.
The BASELAYER EDGE X2 series offers both the hardware and the software to meet the needs of affordable edge computing. By revolutionizing performance, we enable our customers to utilize their critical infrastructure in ways they’ve never been able to do before. Our goal is to reshape how performance is viewed in the data center through advanced modular technology, infrastructure management software, and big data analytics.
