The expected rollout of 5G is playing an integral role in edge data centre investments in India, a senior executive of Dell Technologies said.
This year, consumption-based models, edge computing, and multi-cloud environments will flourish, said Srinivas Rao, Senior Director of system engineering at Dell.
According to a Markets and Markets report, the edge data centre market size is expected to grow from USD 7.2 billion in 2021 to USD 19.1 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.4 per cent during the forecast period.
The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted edge data centre solution adoption across industry verticals as the users move to leverage field service solutions advantages, such as expansions and less cost. Despite the global economic slowdown, around 50 per cent of subscription companies are expanding at a similar pace without any negative influence due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to media reports, he further added that the ‘do-anything-from-anywhere’ economy requires a highly complex IT system capable of managing the exponential data that it generates.
Emerging technologies like edge computing, 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasing the discovery of insights from data and the digitisation of key business processes.
By 2025, most of this data will be processed outside a traditional data centre or cloud.
Edge solutions will become the most feasible option for real-time data processing and for harnessing data-driven insights at or near the source of data generation, Rao said.
“As IT infrastructure becomes more dispersed, Dell will focus on simplifying and modernising, while reducing infrastructure costs,” Rao added.
The scope of IT Edge
He further explained that modern data management is set to change. Most of the world’s data is predicted to move out of the public cloud environment where non-real-time, centralised data is being managed.
“We anticipate that the entire data management ecosystem will develop and utilise edge IT capacity at the ingress and egress of their data pipelines, and remotely process and digest data on the edge,” Rao said.
Egress implies traffic that exits an entity or a network boundary, while ingress is traffic that enters the boundary of a network.
The report further added that Dell estimates that as the data management ecosystem extends to the edge, the number of edge workloads will continue to grow dramatically, and data management will become an untried class of workload.
“Edge computing is one of the core components of the industrial Internet of Things. It plays a significant role in accelerating the journey towards industry 4.0 adoption,” Rao said.
He further pointed out that automated decision-making solutions were one of the factors driving the growth of edge computing.
Compute platforms at the Edge are likely to provide lightweight designs that can be successfully deployed despite spatial, environmental, power, and connectivity constraints. These designs are more secure and can support applications that demand insights in real-time.
One of the biggest challenges is enterprise IT infrastructure being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data generated for analysis.
“Too many organisations were trying to develop edge-specific technologies, operations, and architectures independent from those that already exist in their local data centres and the cloud, and the further organisations go down this path, the less likely they will be able to absorb innovations, contain costs, maintain security, and avoid complexities with vendor management,” Rao said.
He further added that in this competitive landscape, to provide the best-in-class experience to their customers, organisations need to manage data effectively to extract maximum value from the edge to the cloud.
