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Inside the Sagrada Familia’s prefabricated data centre edge is that you gather data from local things and compute it there and therefore deliver high bandwidth in local areas,” says Matthew Baynes, Schneider Electric’s datacentre strategy and business development director, UK and Ireland. The Sagrada Familia’s new data centre was needed to manage ticketing admissions, retail operations, video surveillance and ongoing engineering design and construction for the next phases of the building project. Moving the data centre offsite was not an option due to concerns with latency and security; but building a data centre within an active construction site introduced the additional risk of downtime
The Internet of Things makes equipment that in the past was just a consumer of content a device that produces it. It creates content at the edge
which would impact business processes. In 16 weeks, Schneider Electric designed, manufactured and delivered a turnkey data centre infrastructure solution, complete with IT, racks, UPS, power distribution, precision cooling, environmental management and fire suppression system. The data centre was transported as two separate prefabricated modules with racks, containment, power, cooling, security and management systems preinstalled and then ganged together on site to create a functional and spacious room. The units were delivered and installed outside of peak times to minimise visitor and congregation disruption. Another advantage of the Sagrada Familia having a prefabricated data centre is that it is movable. This would reduce construction costs by eliminating the need to build two different sites. Schneider Electric says the data centre has been built with the future in mind and will accommodate Sagrada Familia’s IT infrastructure growth. l schneider-electric.com
Figure 1: Comparison of total three-year management and processing costs of Cloud only vs. Edge + Cloud with 95% Edge Data Reduction (200 miles distance) 000s ($) Three-year cost of managing and processing data
with AWS IoT services. With a distance of 200 miles between the wind farm and the cloud, and with an assumed 95% reduction in traffic from using the edge computing capabilities, the total cost is reduced from about $81,000 to $29,000 over three years. The authors suggest that “even with much shorter distances, the advantage of Edge computing is likely to be overwhelming”. Edge computing is going to be a prevealent force in the future, not only in industrial and IT applications but places such as retail centres and even churches. An example of this is the Gaudi-designed Sagrada Familia, a Catholic Basilica in Barcelona and Unesco world heritage site. It might be thought that processing capability of a church would be adequate to use the internet and have cloud-based processing capability. However, as well as being a working church it has more than 3 million visitors per year and is also still a construction site, aiming to be completed by 2026, 100 years after Gaudi’s death. Sagrada Familia had been running its IT service in a server room with inadequate space for expansion. To accommodate the need for increased digitisation of its business processes such as point of sale for the many vistors and for more security, Sagrada Familia was compelled to expand. “The IoT makes equipment that in the past was just a consumer of content a device that produces it. It creates content at the edge,” comments Schneider Electric’s vicepresident, IT and data centre business Arun Shenoy. “By 2020 there will be 50 billion IoT devices. Cloud and service provider markets are dominating growth and change but can the re-architecture of the internet happen quickly enough to support IoT? We need edge computing. We need both hyperscale and edge, it’s not a question of either.” “The great thing about the
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Edge + Cloud
Source: Wikibon IoT Project
April 2016 MCP