• Micro data centers facilitate data processing and storage at the network edge or wherever the user needs concentrated computing power.
• Edge computing plays a crucial role in effectively implementing several embedded applications such as Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and deep learning.

The question of where businesses should store their data is evolving as industries depend more on data for day-to-day operations. As enterprises transition to the cloud, high latency and bandwidth difficulties substantially impact regular operations.

Organizations are forced to use Edge computing power due to the growing demand for real-time data. For better performance, keeping the processing close by is essential, and many businesses use micro data centers (MDC) for their edge computing requirements.

This blog highlights edge computing and how data centers drive the revolution in edge computing.

Diving into Micro Data Centers

A micro data center provides the operations of a traditional data center in a compact unit of rack-mounted IT equipment isolated from the cloud data center or centralized enterprise. Being a highly integrated alternative to IT closets or small server rooms, micro data centers offer specific applications across the network. The composition and placement of these micro data centers are managed to fit a wide range of applications, ranging from a small office cabinet to a shipping container that protects racks in harsh, remote surroundings.

Micro data centers facilitate data processing and storage at the network edge or wherever the user needs concentrated computing power but lacks the capital, business case, and space for a fully-equipped data center. The real-time data processing insights can be easily accessed to immediately act on for leveraging business agility and competitive advantage. Besides, these data centers are easy to deploy and can be incorporated with few routers switching between data sources and servers.

What is Edge Computing?

Edge computing plays a crucial role in effectively implementing several embedded applications such as Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and deep learning. Since traditional data centers cannot meet these application requirements, the Edge Micro-Data Center (EMDC) comes into the picture.

By embedding intelligence with systems, i.e., to the edge, it becomes feasible to generate highly autonomous and decision-oriented capabilities. This reduces reliance on centralized systems by providing other significant advantages concerning lower prices, reduced latency, and energy savings.

Examples of early utilities of edge computing include robotic surgery, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality in manufacturing, and drones. The operational requirements of these applications are met by integrating edge infrastructure such as EMDCs.

Edge computing can reduce response times in mission-critical applications to facilitate real-time operations. The cloud serves the role of a memory unit in data storage while peripheral nodes process large data volumes, thus improving sensitivity and overall data security. Edge computing technology can effectively enhance the range of services and applications by natively supporting AI instead of solely depending on AI in the cloud.

Various modern-day applications such as smart manufacturing, industry 4.0, 5G, smart cities, robotics, and machine vision thrive on edge computing technological approach.

Enabling Edge Computing with Micro Data Centers

With industries heavily relying on data for daily operations, the question of data storage has been evolving. As organizations are adopting cloud storage, the issues of bandwidth and latency are influencing their daily functions. Many enterprises observed that their operations require crucial applications that use robust real-time analysis, which the cloud and centralized data centers can no longer serve.

The increasing requirement for real-time data has been compelling organizations to adopt edge computing. Many companies use micro data centers for edge computing requirements by keeping the processes integrated to enhance performance.

The following advantages of edge computing can be reaped by using micro data centers:

• Data Security

Security becomes a primary concern when it comes to dealing with sensitive, confidential data. Despite devices being adequately secured, a safer architecture actually lowers the chances of a data breach. The dispersed edge computing architecture makes it challenging to accord over traditional models. It also becomes feasible to cut loose a single breached area without the need to shut down the overall system.

• Bandwidth

A large number of networks work with restricted bandwidth. Increasing bandwidth is expensive and does not necessarily resolve all the issues. On the other hand, Edge computing effectively lowers bandwidth by reducing the overall traffic volume reciprocating in central servers. Redundant processing tasks and narrowing hindrances are discarded by IT so that users can take advantage of faster resultant performance.

• Latency

Traditional networking mandates data to be transmitted to centralizing servers for processing. The servers then revert with instructions in case of any response. This altogether causes a delay.

Micro data centers with edge computing can deliver quick response time across more traditional models. As it processes crucial functions close to the user, it can cause considerable delays in operation.

 Domains Leveraging Edge Computing and Micro Data Centers

Most enterprises work with real-time processing and also use 5G technology, sensors, IoT, etc. These industries often encounter issues of latency and bandwidth limitation. Edge computing integrated with micro data centers resolves these hurdles by curbing data travel. Although beneficial to most organizations, edge computing is crucial for industries utilizing cutting-edge resources and smart devices. To name a few, energy, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and gaming can be precisely mentioned.

With the emergence of 5G, many companies now demand micro data centers’ processing resources. Besides, these enterprises will likely undergo a digital transition and require processing power to stay in the competitive market.

Major Benefits of Micro Data Center

Being compact-sized, micro data centers exhibit a powerful performance delivery to help organizations across the domain to enhance their digital strategies. The primary benefits are as follows:

1) Quick Integration: Micro data centers’ compact assembly and faster deployment timelines show they are quickly operational, whether pre-assembled or customized. The flexibility in cost and construction of a micro data center makes it suitable for operational requirements and expenses.

2) Space Compatible: Micro data centers are suitable for limited-space applications in retail stores, factory floors, remote industrial sites, or cellular towers. Due to compact integration and size, they are handy and portable compared to other equipment installed in the server closet. Another advantage it serves is that the installation can be shipped to a different location where IT personnel are not available, and some constraints prevent on-site installation.

3) Availability: Micro data centers can be configured for any degree of availability according to the application requirements. Though the risk of downtime can be lowered, the cost increases due to higher availability.

4) Remote Coordination: The configuration and design of micro data centers are suitable for remote devices and power management. With remote coordination capabilities, managing and monitoring micro data centers in highly isolated locations become easy, negating site travel expenses and the wait for in-demand technicians.

5) Effective Cooling Systems: The advanced micro data center design helps enhance cooling efficiency. Well-curated airflow management coupled with cooling systems can lower energy waste and other problems caused by exhaust air recirculation.

6) Scalability: Micro data centers can support current and future requirements. They can be easily upgraded or extended at any given time. Major updates include enhanced power capacity, increased battery backup runtime, management features, redundancy, and provisional cooling.

Conclusion

The small-footprint data hubs, such as micro data centers, will be an integral segment of future IT operations. The integration of edge computing and micro data centers can simplify major technical hurdles and make the system operations quicker. End-users’ accessibility to storage and computational resources can be facilitated with micro data centers. Moreover, the cost of operation, installation, and deployment time reduces with surging scalability and resilience.

It is an absolute truth that the future data centre will be software-defined. It has to be as it requires flexibility, speed, and efficiency to become competitive in the environment. Why not? Defining resources such as compute, storage, and networking with software enables greater flexibility than traditional hardware.

So, when software is the soul of data center storage, why is hardware important?

As more business-critical applications are moving to hyper-converged platforms, customers may think hardware is unimportant. SDDCs are still dependent upon hardware for their capacity to run and hold data. The myth that software alone can support the data center is incorrect and dangerous. First things first, SDDCs run on hardware! Many must know about it, but if the right servers are not in place, organizations cannot do all the other cool stuff that comes along with SDDC. So, deploying hardware from a verified, trusted solution provider is important, and it makes all the difference.

A hyper-converged infrastructure or hardware aims to simplify all data center components—storage, compute, networking and management—within a single, pre-configured hardware box.

Hyper-converged hardware can have a significant impact on the working of the applications and data center operations. Businesses opt for hyper-converged hardware solutions because they can simplify ops, add flexibility and agility and move in faster.

Let me put forth some of the benefits of hardware to explain why they matter still.

1. Increased capacity

Because SDDC runs on hardware, performance is constrained by the capacity and limitations of the servers. In the absence of hardware, one is forced to operate within the boundaries of available resources, and if those resources are limited, the SDDC capabilities will also be limited.

2. Speedy deployment

A modern infrastructure helps reduce the time it takes to deploy new applications. Automation tools such as zero-touch deployment make life a lot easier for the IT staff. Aging infrastructure consumes a lot of time – IT organizations can take days, weeks, and even months – to deploy new versions of applications in their data centers. Here, modernized servers or hardware can bring the time down by doing the tasks quickly.

3. Easily scalable

The right hardware will allow one to scale to meet changing needs easily. Modernized data servers support data growth because they give the capability to add additional sources, including memory. One can scale out to meet business demands, avoiding infrastructure “sprawl.”

4. Enhanced Staff productivity

One aspect of modernized data servers is that your IT staff need not spend a large chunk of time managing day-to-day tasks. Modernized servers help automate tasks, making it a lot easier to deploy, monitor, and maintain so that the staff can add real value to the business.

5. Workloads supporting new technology

In present times, workloads are growing more complex. And emerging workloads require a large amount of parallelized computation requiring modernized servers designed specifically to support them. An organization needs the right infrastructure or hardware to use machine learning, predictive analytics, or deep learning. A Forrester study found that 67% of the servers purchased next year will help support emerging technology, including additive manufacturing, predictive analytics, and edge computing.

6. Simple workload placement

One benefit of modernized servers is their ability to customize workload placement based on specific needs and resources. It means you can run some of the workloads on-premises (data-sensitive applications) while keeping others in the cloud. For example, PowerEdge MX700, which was specifically designed for SDDC, is a modular, software-defined infrastructure that can assign, move and scale shared pools of storage, compute, and fabric with higher efficiency.

Conclusion

While one may think that it is just the software that matters, the truth is that hardware involves in the pre-integrated services to ensure that everything works seamlessly together to give speed, simplicity, and flexibility for the smooth running of the business. In short, in conditions when other vendors think that hardware plays a side role, one must keep in mind that hardware is the foundation of the software-defined storage. It is the choice of hardware that matters.

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Maintaining the availability and quality of online services with increasing demand in general and more so during the pandemic is no simple task. The pandemic highlighted the importance of data centres as it not only ensures functioning of IT companies but also made daily lives conveinient. This industry has performed well and is projected to “grow 18% annually to exceed USD 270 billion through 2024.”

So what’s in store for 2022? Let’s look at some of the significant data center trends that business leaders and data professionals should look forward to this year.

1. Hyperscale will continue in 2022 (and beyond)

Hyperscale data centers are also known as ultra-scalability as they facilitate on-demand provision of IT resources and distributed systems. Basically, a number of servers work in tandem at high speed, thus enhancing its speed to expand both horizontally and vertically. This enables efficient storage and transfer of data. Depending on the needs of a network or performance, the servers can be increased or decreased.

Hyperscale helps construct systems that are strong and have scalable distributed infrastructure to meet the big data and cloud computing requirements of modern enterprises. It is a single-solution architecture that consists of compute, storage, and virtualization layers. With hyperscale data centers, organizations can store ever-increasing data volumes in traditional data centers. This will  help them save on costs and ensure seamless user experiences regardless of the level of data usage. Given the benefits, the pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitization across various industries.

2. Infrastructure remote management

Data centers work round the clock. The study of US data centers quantifies the average cost of an unplanned data center outage at slightly more than USD 7,900 per minute. To cope with the situation, onsite technicians or engineers are essential, but the pandemic and employee shortage posed a threat to data center system outage with no one available on-premises.

The one most notable improvements COVID-19 brought forth is the Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM), which allows businesses to control their data center infrastructure remotely. RIM includes desktop monitoring of security and network services, database management, server management, etc.

Developments of RIM started during the pandemic, and today it is revamping the data center industry. The year 2022 will witness more advancements in real-time infrastructure management, wherein users gain more control over deeper insights and operating parameters.

3. Edge computing never leaving the space

Edge computing will remain a significant player in 2022 (and beyond). With more people adopting intelligent technologies in their homes and accessories, the demand for edge computing and data centers, too, is expected to grow. The IoT market is expected to grow by over USD 50 billion by 2022. Given this and the kind of demand for reliability, speed, and connectivity, the edge market will have to grow.

On the one hand, by processing data locally, it fuels the need for low latency applications and on the other, the edge devices are connected to colocation providers. It is expected that the year 2022 will witness huge growth in devices that use small data capabilities with recent developments in self-driving cars, industrial automation, the internet of things, and wearable devices.

4. Green and sustainability should be persistent

The ‘Green Concept’ has been adopted not just to achieve the industrial objective but it is also being adopted to fulfil the target of negative carbon footprints. Data center service providers and businesses are testing energy efficiency, water usage, and generated waste.

Data centers will be focusing on addressing various sustainability issues in 2022. Microsoft has committed to 100% renewable energy for its DC operations. Other technology companies are also experimenting with energy storage. This will help boost solar usage for massive data centers. 2022 will see a significant shift in the way businesses globally approach climate change.

According to a survey conducted by Equinix, 45% of the IT decision-makers said that customers want their data centers to be sustainable. It is primarily due to the increasing number of customers wishing to reduce their energy and water consumption. Many data centers are installing air-cooled systems to avoid continuous closed loops.

5. AI and amp; Automation will ease working

With the pandemic, many organizations faced a shortage of on-site technicians and engineers who could solve the problems plaguing the data centers. In such times, AI and Machine Learning helped in remote management and monitoring of the DC systems. With the help of robotics, automation helped in managing the infrastructure physically. It was a long-desired dream that has now turned into a reality with the integration of AI and automation into data center facilities. With the increased demand for data, data centers are scaling at a rate that will soon bypass the managing capabilities of human staff. 2022 will witness a growth in automation and AI for managing and monitoring data centers.

For example, companies like Ekkosense are providing AI-based solutions to track data centers based on operational and environmental parameters. In the coming years, AI and automation will come handy for DC managers to reduce operational costs and improve operational efficiency.

6. Achieve 5G Goals  

The realization of the 5G technology goal will be another element that will have a huge impact on the need for edge data centers, and support the growth of the IoT. There are many networking companies who are in the race to achieve the 5G capability, but many have failed to achieve speed or reliability in the real world.

However, data centers have presented industries and businesses with a way to use data differently. In the same vein, the growth of edge computing will drive greater demand for 5G technologies and the installation of nodes to support that kind of network.

Conclusion

It is known that data center capacity needs to grow in order to give the new automated and digital world a boost. The key to attain this is to grow this capacity responsibly with a focus on sustainable (i.e., efficient, circular and managed) solutions at the edge.

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