ISE Magazine, December 2019
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9 WWW ISEMAG COM 2 3 MEC seamlessly with resources located in colos the cloud or at the edge The result is a broad data ecosystem comprised of many types of facilities and relying increasingly on the edge of the network When we revisited Data Center 2025 earlier this year the edge was top of mind for more than 800 data center professionals we surveyed Of participants who have edge sites today or expect to have edge sites in 2025 more than half 53 expect the number of edge sites they support to grow by at least 100 and even that may undersell the coming rush to the edge Consider this 20 expect an increase of 400 or more See Figure 1 Understanding the Edge While a lot has been written and said about the edge of the network in recent years there has been little agreement about exactly what that edge is Our attempt to categorize edge deployments focused on emerging use cases at the edge and led us to discover what we identified as 4 archetypes for those edge sites See Figure 2 THE 4 ARCHETYPES ARE Archetype 1 DATA INTENSIVE This includes use cases where the amount of data makes it impractical to transfer over the network directly to the cloud or from the cloud to point of use due to data volume cost or bandwidth issues Examples include smart cities smart factories smart homes buildings high definition content distribution high performance computing restricted connectivity virtual reality and oil and gas digitization The most widely used Super Cool Figure 1 Growth in Edge Computing Sites
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