COMMS+DATA
CLOUD COMPUTING
MOVES TO THE EDGE John Schmidt, Data Center Solutions Lead, CommScope
The face of data centre infrastructure is changing, thanks to the cloud.
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lobal data centre networks are fully integrated into our daily lives and activities. Every post, tweet, email, online purchase, financial transaction, picture and video we collectively produce flows through an intricate network of switches, routers and servers connected via fibre optics inside monolithic, concrete buildings we elegantly refer to as the “cloud”. As a society we are wholly reliant on this infrastructure and it is fundamentally changing. In 2015 the world’s population produced 3.7 exabytes of mobile data on a monthly basis, which is a 74% increase over 2014 and a 4000x increase over the past decade[1]. As a result of this unprecedented growth in data consumption, content is being pushed closer and closer to consumers, or to the edge of the network. This change in architecture has profound implications on data centre networking and design that we will discuss further. First let us examine the drivers that are pushing content to the edge of the network.
Latency As data consumption increases the corresponding willingness to wait for content has decreased. Our expectation of immediate service continues to increase even as richer content is served up and devoured. A consumer viewing Netflix in high definition has an expectation of near zero buffering. That same consumer has the same expectation for 4K video even though the corresponding bandwidth is 5x higher[2]. Consumers have an expectation that native data on a tablet or mobile device and apps utilising data from the cloud have the same user experience. The average user has the same expectations of a movie that is downloaded and played and one that is streamed in terms of both quality and instantaneous access. New technologies such as virtual reality/augmented reality, high-resolution cloud-based gaming, and cloud-assisted autonomous vehicles will require even lower 40
latencies to support evolving user expectations. Content delivery networks (CDN) have made a science of caching and delivering content within local regions. CDN has previously been a niche market dominated by companies such as Akamai, but now major players like Amazon and Google are offering their own CDN for both their own use and their customers. CDN performance will increase dramatically from a buildout at the edge of the network. The closer these networks are to the user, the better the performance. Of course this need for lower latency is not relegated to consumers only. Businesses are also driving the need for edge computing. Most notably, brokerages and in particular high-frequency trading (HFT) rely on minimal latency to provide the highest level of performance to their clients.
Data sovereignty The concept of data sovereignty is centred on the belief, and in many jurisdictions the law, that digital data is subject to the regulations of the country in which it is stored. With cloud computing, data could reside nearly anywhere in the network. Strict interpretations enacted by various countries mean that it is the responsibility of the network provider to make sure that data that originates in a given country is stored locally to ensure compliance with the law. The obvious method to make this happen is to have local data centres in country. This is generally counter to the concept of a virtualised cloud where data could exist in various instances globally. With edge data centres, cloud providers have the ability to comply with even the strictest interpretations of the law while also providing optimal service to the local region. In the long run, cloud companies are lobbying for safe harbour exemptions, but until then they must find alternative means of compliance. Edge data centres provide a means to this end.
This issue is sponsored by — Schneider Electric — www.schneider-electric.com.au/en/work/campaign/wholesaler/motor-protection.jsp