Scale Computing, a market leader in Edge Computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, has announced a collaboration with IBM that will help organizations adopt an Edge Computing strategy designed to enable them to move data and applications seamlessly across hybrid cloud environments, from private data centers to the Edge. Scale Computing is delivering on-premises Edge Computing solutions for applications that are designed to be flexible and intelligent to help address high-availability and resilience.
A recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, Why Organizations Are Betting On Edge Computing: Insights From The Edge, revealed that 91% of the 1,500 executives surveyed indicated that their organizations plan to implement Edge Computing strategies within five years. IBM Edge Application Manager, an autonomous management solution that runs on Red Hat OpenShift, enables the secured deployment, continuous operations and remote management of AI, analytics and IoT enterprise workloads to deliver real-time analysis and insights at scale.
“We see that the periphery of storage and compute has undergone transformational changes on so many fronts over the last 18 months – from employee and customer health and safety, supply chain challenges, to shifting product demands, to being an increasing target of cyberattacks,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and Co-founder of Scale Computing. “We believe that Edge Computing is critical for the future of many organizations, and organizations of all sizes across all industries can take steps now to help simplify the deployment and management of localized compute infrastructure in a secure and resilient manner.
“We are excited to team our HC3 Edge Computing solutions with IBM Edge Application Manager in an effort to help organizations optimize their operations across the globe with infrastructure designed to be self-healing and automated, as well as added containerized application management that can help them grow into the new reality of Edge Computing.”
Scale Computing HC3 Edge Computing solutions are designed to provide customers with an autonomous infrastructure that can run modern containerized applications alongside legacy applications as virtual machines. This can help users centrally monitor and manage their fleet of distributed infrastructure and applications through the entire life cycle – from deployment and maintenance updates to service level monitoring and problem remediation.
“We look forward to collaborating with Scale Computing to help clients deploy, operate and manage thousands of endpoints throughout their operations with IBM Edge Application Manager,” said Evarisitus Mainsah, GM, IBM Hybrid Cloud and Edge Ecosystem. “Together, we can help enterprises accelerate their Digital Transformation by acting on insights closer to where their data is being created, at the Edge.”
We asked industry experts: How can adopting an Edge Computing strategy benefit organizations?
Surya Varanasi, CTO, StorCentric
For decades, data management and protection strategies have embraced the central corporate data center, remote locations and cloud. More recently, over the last decade or so, data management and protection mindsets have expanded to include remote edge locations.
Of course, this pendulum swing between centralized and distributed models is nothing new. However, it has become clear that a more distributed, edge-centric model is here to stay, given how the dramatic and likely permanent changes in how we work, learn, shop and live over the past year have accelerated the generation of data at the network edge, where you find things like smart phones and desktop/laptop computers, as well as POS systems, self-serve purchase kiosks, smart cars, smart appliances and other IoT devices.
Clearly, adopting an Edge Computing strategy is a necessity in order to compete and survive in today’s increasingly edge-based economy. The most critical aspect of doing so is in the ability to move data quickly, safely and accurately to where it needs to be.
The key is to deploy a cloud-enabled solution that supports data migration, data replication and data synchronization across mixed environments including disk, tape and cloud to maximize ROI by eliminating data silos.
The ideal solution will support vendor agnostic file replications and synchronization and should be easily deployed and managed on a non-proprietary server. In addition, the ideal solution should be capable of transferring millions of files simultaneously and protecting data in transit to and from the cloud with bullet-proof SSL encryption.
For those that master seamless and secure data mobility, they will remain the master of their data wherever it resides, today, tomorrow and into the future.
Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i
McKinsey recently advised that Edge Computing would represent a potential value of US$175 billion to US$215 billion in hardware by 2025. And, according to Verified Market Research, the Global IoT market size was valued at US$212.1 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow 25.68% between 2019-2026 and reach US$1,319.08 billion by 2026.
This is because Edge Computing has proven itself invaluable in its ability to overcome a multitude of IT issues, thereby enabling organizations to make faster, more efficient and effective use of the volumes of data generated from IoT and other smart devices.
With such undeniable benefits, it is clear that organizations must adopt an Edge Computing strategy. However, it is critical that as they do so they address the one issue that Edge Computing has not been able to solve for IoT, which is security. In fact, in most cases, Edge Computing can actually introduce even greater security risk, if not managed properly.
Therefore, as organizations move forward with their Edge Computing strategy, they must seek solutions that are designed specifically for those architecting IoT deployments, that need secure and discreet network connectivity between the Edge devices, data center and cloud.
The solution should answer the call for a single cost-effective network connectivity solution that scales from Edge devices to the largest data center servers and cloud platforms and is simple to configure and manage.
With such a solution in hand, for the first time, organizations will be freed from traditional IoT connectivity solutions that use VPNs, SD-WANs or open ports which require in-depth networking knowledge, are expensive and tedious to configure, and create large and dangerous attack surfaces. And instead, they will be able to build and manage secure, dynamic end-to-end data tunnels between Edge device services, data center and cloud hubs, creating a Zero Trust network architecture that virtually eliminates any attack surface.
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