Navigating Edge Infrastructure: Recommendations to Reduce Costs and Deployment Timelines

Physical infrastructure is central to any edge computing strategy. The power and cooling equipment and enclosure support the computing resources that run various applications and enable countless edge use cases. Deploying the right physical infrastructure is critical at the edge given that many deployments are in locations without on-site IT support and where remote monitoring and management are required.

Navigating edge infrastructure is made more complicated with the broad and varied definitions of edge. These factors make it challenging for the 49% of enterprises exploring edge computing deployments. They must make decisions on how to use existing infrastructure and where to make investments today to support the needs of tomorrow. Fortunately, there is an ecosystem of suppliers, system integrators, and other channel partners with experience and expertise in edge deployments to provide support.

Building on Vertiv’s work on the Edge Archetypes, which provided a taxonomy for categorizing edge use cases, the linked Special Report: Edge Archetypes 2.0 Deployment-Ready Edge Infrastructure Models, takes those archetypes a step further to define four distinct edge infrastructure models. The framework is based on interviews with a range of industry practitioners, data center experts, solution providers, and industry bodies across smart city, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail applications.

Key findings:

• Edge computing infrastructure will not act as a substitute for cloud. The total number of edge sites is estimated to grow by 226% from 2019 to 2025. Cloud will continue to grow at a CAGR of 10%.

• The United States is leading the way with edge initiatives and is estimated to be the largest market for edge computing driven by key industries such as manufacturing.

• Edge archetypes were a first step toward edge categorization, identifying edge deployments based on use cases. The new edge infrastructure models go a step further to enable customized equipment and design standardization that can increase efficiency and reduce costs and deployment timelines. The four edge infrastructure models are Device Edge, Micro Edge, Distributed Edge Data Center, and Regional Edge Data Center.

• Most Life Critical archetype use cases will use the Device Edge infrastructure model in the medium term, whereas Data Intensive, Human-Latency Sensitive, and Machine-to-Machine Latency Sensitive use cases will accelerate the transition from Regional Edge Data Center to Micro Edge and Distributed Edge Data Center infrastructure models in the near term.

• Coordinating the many elements of edge computing (software, hardware, infrastructure, etc.) is challenging and requires an ecosystem of partners to support the 66% of enterprises that prefer to have an entire edge solution coming from a single lead vendor.

Join us here to dive deeper into the Vertiv Special Report: Edge Archetypes 2.0 Deployment-Ready Edge Infrastructure Models.