For many years now, data centers have been a hot subject of debate among IT teams. Data centers by tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and other corporations provide various services to customers worldwide. Large facilities with vast quantities of data. With the growth of Internet infrastructure, however, the introduction of 5 G technology, the rise of devices for the Internet of Things (IoT), and bandwidth-intensive applications have increased data center traffic and thus increased latency. Therefore, today, businesses are moving to data centers that are closer to the point of application or generation, i.e., edge, to address this.
Although there is no real concept of an edge data center, it can be regarded as a smaller version of a data center with facilities that extend the network edge to provide local end users with cloud storage services and cached streaming content. Companies would have greater control over data processing and storage at the edge of a network by getting close to the point of data operation as opposed to establishing it in existing centralized data centers. It is important to remember that an edge data center, including a central enterprise data center, maybe part of a complex network.
Gartner expects that by 2025, at the edge and not at the central data center, there will be a 75 percent leap in data generation and processing. IDC estimates, meanwhile, that more than half of all data will be generated by as many as 80 billion Internet of Things devices at the edge of the network. The consequence of this development is that by 2023, 70 percent of companies will be forced to institute data processing on the edge. The global edge data center market is projected to nearly triple to $13.5 billion in 2024 from $4 billion in 2017, according to PWC, thanks to the ability for these smaller, locally based data centers to minimize latency and resolve intermittent connections.
Edge computing is currently leveraged through autonomous driving vehicles, drones, streaming of content delivery, video monitoring services, gadgets for augmented reality and virtual reality, and some applications for artificial intelligence. Each of them runs on inputs of real-time data and generates data that for a very short time frame has value. Edge allows data output to be more quickly filtered, analyzed and relayed back to end-users. This implies bypassing several switches, routers, base stations, and other touchpoints that could make it a long process, costing more time and resources.
Companies can cut the physical distance that data needs to travel to reach a data facility via edge data centers, resulting in reduced latency. Besides, because of its redundant feature, assuming that one edge data center goes offline due to power outage or any other reason, its services can be picked up by surrounding facilities to ensure a greater percentage of uptime.
