The past decade has witnessed the emergence of cloud infrastructure as a crucial element further accelerating the digitization of our lives. Compute infrastructure and even computing itself as a service has fundamentally altered our view of scalability, capital expenditure, and maintenance.
The result has been an unprecedented build-out of data center infrastructure in hyperscale facilities, colo’s, and public-private hybrid implementations.
Compute has become increasingly centralized and aggregated to the cloud. A new era where cloud infrastructure would be the only IT infrastructure was predicted and hailed. Yet as the cloud has taken off, new requirements and needs are coming to light. Specifically, the need to capture, compute and analyze data at the point of transaction has become increasingly important for companies. It is now becoming clear that the cloud alone will not suffice and that the edge of the network infrastructure is increasingly crucial to further hasten the digital revolution.
Expectedly, the main drivers of the needs at the edge are bandwidth, latency, and privacy and security. In many ways, we are repeating the technology cycle from centralized to decentralized compute. Internet of Things is also requiring smart processing and high compute intensity in edge devices. Further, instantaneous analytics and machine learning use cases need high-density computing infrastructure close to the end nodes like self-driving cars, Industry 4.0 machinery, security & surveillance, etc. Another crucial need relates to enterprises organized as hub and spoke networks – retail stores, banking, telecom networks all operate in this model. These businesses require the spoke (branch) elements to be operating without disruption and need to be self-sufficient for their compute needs.
All these needs are transforming the way the next generation IT and OT (more about OT in part 2 of this blog) infrastructure is architected and deployed. While edge computing is in its early stages, expectations and hype are high. The global edge computing market is expected to grow to $19.4B1 by 2023 with 17.9% CAGR from 2017-2023 (80% of data storage will be at the edge by 20252). Given the high market expectations, players from various domains are announcing edge-compute solutions to capture their share of this opportunity (figure below).
Likewise, Arrow’s Intelligent Solutions team is announcing a comprehensive edge computing solution which provides end-to-end capabilities. Everything from design engineering to integrated HW and SW solutions and post implementation managed services to end of life solutions. With this new offering, we will provide a full life cycle of services to enterprises, OEMs, ISVs, system integrators, and any customer looking to get to the Edge.
As the saying goes, “The only constant is change” and certainly we are in yet another technology transition where data is King and the companies who get to it faster and use it more efficiently – to increase revenue, reduce cost and minimize risk will quite simply – win!
