Three Myths and Predictions About Edge Data Centers

Edge data centers are located closest to users and provide good services directly to users. At present, there are many misunderstandings about edge data centers, and we need to be cautious. In the future, edge data centers will face huge challenges and opportunities, which are worth looking forward to.

Three Myths and Predictions About Edge Data Centers

Nowadays, the construction scale of data centers is getting larger and larger, and many super-large data centers have emerged. These data centers have strong data processing capabilities, but they still cannot meet people's demand for data center applications. The reason is that many data center users are spread all over the world, and these users have different access methods and access bandwidths, so the user experience of accessing the data center is completely different.

No matter how large the data center is, if the access bandwidth to the data center is small, users still cannot get a good experience. Therefore, many Internet giants are now building data centers around the world to form data center clusters. Although the scale of each data center is not very large, it can meet the access needs of local users. Local users can directly access the local data center, so that they can get a good experience when watching videos, playing games, and applying computing. These data centers can be called edge data centers.

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Beware of the three major misunderstandings of edge data centers

As mobile communications and last-mile bandwidth enter advanced and modern applications, people need low-latency network connections, and computing loads are moving from centralized data centers to the edge of the network. But there are many misunderstandings about edge data centers.

Myth 1: Edge computing is a way to make servers cheaper to operate. Edge data centers may be small, but they won’t be cheap servers connected by DSL.

Myth 2: The network is not important. It is more difficult to provide a good user experience at the edge of the network than in a data center with high-availability connections and power systems. In the field of data center design, people sometimes regard the network as a second thought, but for edge data centers, enterprises need a solid network.

Myth 3: Managing edge computing is easy. Edge data centers are not a single model. An edge data center can range from a single rack to 20 or 30 machines, and no matter their size, they need the right equipment.

Three predictions for edge data centers

As we all know, edge computing requires millions of devices running on different hardware and software layers that users may or may not update. We have reached an age where some enterprises do not trust applications that are located behind the firewall of the internal network. Users may not understand how to operate to avoid security issues, and the problem is exacerbated by those who hope to bypass security settings through methods such as cracking.

Besides security issues, one of the challenges we face is how to ensure that data is always stored in the region where data storage laws apply, as data flows through point-to-point mobile connections, hosted by edge data centers, and flows in and out of different regions and continents.

Edge computing is the only way to help make IoT work as a solution to the huge growth of data patterns driven by IoT. Take a small IoT device as an example, it may only push a small amount of data every minute, but if a company has tens of thousands of such devices, it will form a very active and busy network. By placing smart data aggregators near the collection devices, this batch of active data can be far away from the backbone network. This star-shaped structure layout can create a smart IoT architecture, helping the main data network to easily handle user data.