EDITOR’S QUESTION
serve local applications and services
requirements more efficiently by virtue of
being in closer proximity to them and the
users or machines concerned, therefore
minimising latency which in certain
applications is mission critical.
This is because real-time processing of
specific operational and production data
enables extremely accurate decision
making. Consider the much vaunted
driverless car or delivery vehicle: to work
efficiently and safely, zero latency is an
absolute must.
SIMON BEARNE,
COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR,
NEXT GENERATION DATA
dge Computing will
become an increasingly
important driver of new
data centres but not
until the IoT and 5G are
truly ubiquitous will the
full extent of its impact be seen. That’s
still a few years away as currently Edge
Computing is based on specific business
cases which then create a particular need
for so called Edge data centres. But right
now it’s still quite patchy.
E
Meanwhile and for the foreseeable
future, there is no slowing down in the
continued massive demand and growth
in cloud computing – public, private and
hybrid – which remain the real engine
room of growth for the colocation data
centre industry.
The hyperscalers (major cloud services
providers such as Amazon, Microsoft
and Google) have a huge, seemingly
30
Issue 07
insatiable appetite for consuming data
centre capacity globally. According to
Synergy Research Group’s latest global
cloud infrastructure services report, cloud
revenues are now at a run rate of almost
US$100 billion per year. They say Q2 2019
revenues compared to the same quarter in
2018 have jumped 39% and there’s no end
in sight to such stellar growth.
Added to this, NGD is seeing significant
demand coming from the ramping up
of High Performance Computing (HPC)
activities by both the public and private
sectors. Therefore, as with cloud hosting,
HPC requires data centres with high
scalability in terms of available space,
vast reserves of highly concentrated
power, specialist cooling, plus diverse
high-speed connectivity.
In time Edge Computing will certainly fuel
the overall demand for new data centres
even further. Data centres located close
to the Edge of the network can often
Of course, Edge data centres aren’t
necessarily the big beasts we are mostly
familiar with today in terms of their
physical size and power resources. Out
of necessity, they are more typically the
micro variety, comprising anything from
one or a handful of servers in a rack, or
a small, containerised solution complete
with inbuilt UPS and cooling; up to a small
modular facility.
However, now and in the future, as Edge
Computing proliferates, facilities like
these will still need to interoperate with
‘traditional’ much larger data centres at
the core of the network; for processing,
analysing and archiving much of the
very large volumes of ‘big data’ being
generated at the Edge.
Edge devices and their data centres
will focus on processing the nuggets of
operational data they need for their own
immediate purposes and actions.
In summary, alongside cloud and HPC,
Edge Computing will add substantially
to the mountains of data already being
generated for processing and storage, with
much of this being done in large fit-for-
purpose core facilities such as NGD’s.
As to which of these will be the single
largest driver for new data centres in the
future, only time can tell.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com