The Edge is Getting Smarter, Smaller, and Moving Further Out
If you are aware of the Internet of Things concept, when you think of IoT devices, you likely picture sensors, household appliances, wearables and the like, all connected to a network. Being connected is how a collection of “things” becomes an “internet of things.” And that’s been the general understanding of the term to date.
Soon, however, connectivity alone may not be enough to qualify. The Internet of Things of the future may be less like a bunch of dumb devices sending data to a server somewhere far away and more like a distributed computing fabric, where many of the IoT devices themselves can analyze the data and make decisions on their own.
Numerous experts speaking at this week’s Internet of Things World conference in Silicon Valley said IoT is pushing the IT industry once again toward a distributed computing model – this time more distributed and intelligent than ever.
Edge computing is a space we cover a lot on Data Center Knowledge in a variety of contexts, including in the context of IoT. Typically, this computing infrastructure has been similar to what you find in any data center, except less of it and deployed in an IT closet or a micro-data center (a specially designed enclosure) in an office building, a retail store, or a factory. Another tier of edge computing infrastructure consists of routers and other boxes that groups of IoT devices connect to on one end and a big remote data center or public cloud platform on the other. They are increasingly being designed with more computing power.
Those types of edge computing infrastructure aggregate data from IoT devices in the same location for storage and/or processing, bringing compute closer to the sources of data. In addition, however, more and more intelligence is now being actively pushed further out, to the end devices themselves.
While in most cases these devices will still send data to a remote centralized cloud, they will send only a fraction of the data they collect. Most importantly, however, they will be able to function autonomously if needed.
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