Extending cloud to the edge

As every aspect of our lives and business goes online organizations are rapidly transforming how, and where business happens. The edge increasingly is where data is being created with it being anticipated that 70% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge. Attempting to manage this growth and data with traditional Cloud technology – where data is moved to and processed in centralized data centers – is becoming increasingly problematic. Challenges include:

• Increasing latency. Sending data from edge devices to a data center and back significantly increases latency, which is unacceptable in use cases like self-driving cars where a millisecond delay in response can be dangerous.
• Reliability issues. Enterprises may not be able to count on mission-critical or time-critical applications because of latency and bandwidth issues.
• Rising costs. Moving massive amounts of data at high speed can quickly increase expenses.
• Lack of bandwidth. There simply may not be enough bandwidth to handle the sheer volume of data generated by edge resources.
• Increasing risks. The growing amount of data sent between edge devices and data center locations increases the attack surface.
  

To manage data generated by edge environments more efficiently, many enterprises are turning to technology that decentralizes processing, shifting processing responsibilities to edge environments. By landing cloud capabilities out at the edge, organizations have more latitude to decide where a specific workload is best processed.

The challenge for IT teams is that as enterprises incorporate more Cloud services and technologies, the task of managing them can become incredibly complex. Each Cloud platform has its own management framework and processes. Without consistent tools, operations and infrastructure, managing multiple Cloud resources can easily add cost and complexity while limiting innovation.

To successfully reap the benefits of edge Cloud technologies and other Cloud products, enterprises need solutions that can unify public, private and edge resources on a single hybrid platform. That’s where Dell Technologies can help.

• Dell Technologies Cloud Platform VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) delivers a turnkey experience that’s easy to deploy and manage due to the tight integration between VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRail. Organizations can now develop, test, and run cloud native applications alongside legacy applications on a single platform.
• Validated Designs, Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs bring best-of-breed Dell EMC infrastructure that is interoperable with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and delivered as pre-tested designs with deployment guidance. Organizations can now meet the varied demands of workloads with independent scaling of compute and storage by building their own hybrid Cloud infrastructure with prescriptive building blocks.
• Data Center as a Service (DCaaS), VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is an on-premises, fully-managed Data Center as-a-Service solution available via subscription. The solution is a combination of the latest VMware Cloud infrastructure software and Dell EMC VxRail hardware.
• Support for all major Cloud partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, along with 4,200 additional Cloud providers.

As a leading Cloud company, Dell Technologies provides solutions that enable enterprises to:

• Simplify management of public, private and edge Cloud resources with a common set of tools and consistent infrastructure.
• Streamline Cloud migration by providing familiar tools and models that reduce errors and create efficiencies for administrators as they move workloads to and between Cloud platforms.
• Increase speed to market with the ability to access the right resources on the right Cloud at the right time.
• Reduce costs with the ability to rely on flexible consumption and payment options across Clouds, minimizing expense and creating cost predictability.
• Improve Cloud security with a single security framework that covers public, private and edge Clouds.
  

How does Cloud at the edge differ from traditional deployments?
Extending cloud capabilities at the edge can often mean deploying in a smaller footprint. It also means delivering resilient infrastructure that can be sustained with minimal physical intervention due to its nature of being deployed in massively distributed, and sometimes hard to service locations. As such it is critical to deploy infrastructure that can deliver the necessary service levels and performance, which often runs counter to how public cloud specifically have been built. 

What are the benefits of edge Cloud computing?
By distributing processing tasks away from data centers to edge locations, and deploying local cloud assets, organizations can enable more low-latency experiences for edge use cases and achieve real-time insights. This is particularly important for applications like self-driving cars, where a delay in processing data could be a life-threatening event. By placing clouds in edge environments organizations can also reduce costs by minimizing the amount of data required to be transferred over long distances. And edge computing helps to reduce bandwidth requirements and improve the reliability of edge applications.