Edge computing the Big and the Small – Guy Willner, Chairman and co-founder of IXcellerate. Data centers in Russia, spoke at the Datacloud Global Congress 2021 about the concept of edge and shared his views. Held remotely for 2021, The Datacloud Global Congress had experts from the data centre industry, each with over 20 years’ experience in different parts of the globe.
EDGE Computing and EDGE Data Center terms have been adopted by the European and American markets for a long time now.
According to Guy Willner, as information revolution develops, the demands for fault tolerance in IT infrastructure keep increasing and so do the volumes of generated data — and it might be plainly impossible to store all that data in the cloud one day. Some companies that use AI-driven algorithms running billions of calculations need Data Centres positioned right next to where the input data originates or as close to the end consumers of its content as possible.
With the advent of 5G networks and other technologies, new ways to use EDGE Data Centers will emerge not only in large cities with high population densities (which is the case right now) but also in smaller regional centers all over the world.
The Small in the Edge world refers to these types of use cases, but there is also the Big Edge: While most global cities over 5million pop have significant (over 20MW) Data center presence, some ( eg Luanda, Dar es Salaam, Lahore) have next to none. And the list of candidate cities of over 1m pop is very long. This Big Edge will absorb a lot of capital over the coming ten years as the sharing of Internet infrastructure continues across the globe.