Digital Realty, Vapor IO, Hivelocity partnership show the symbiotic relationship of core-to-edge cloud architectures

The partners: Digital Realty brings the data center and interconnection pieces through PlatformDIGITAL. Vapor IO deploys micro data centers in edge locations with interconnection and network exchange capabilities. Hivelocity is a bare metal cloud infrastructure provider that sells directly to end users.

The partnership tiers: Digital Realty’s data center in Atlanta at 250 Williams Street will serve as the core location. Hivelocity and Vapor are also housed in this location. Hivelocity has its bare metal services there and Vapor has stood up its Kinetic Edge Exchange nodes. Vapor connects these network exchange nodes to micro data centers it has deployed in the Atlanta area near fibre junctions owned by its partner Crown Castle. This new expanded partnership will see Hivelocity deploy servers at edge locations in Atlanta through Vapor’s edge sites. The increment is relatively small – about a quarter-rack with 150-180kW of power – but targeted at a specific customer use case (AlefEdge, a provider of private 5G wireless networks was disclosed as the first customer). With the tiers in place, and the network connectivity enabled, Hivelocity is able to build a core-edge deployment that has the flexibility to accommodate distributed architectures with targeted edge requirements.

Hivelocity to continue expanding to the edge: Hivelocity can also connect out to other Vapor edge locations through the Kinetic Fabric or set up bare metal infrastructure there. In fact, Hivelocity confirmed it would expand to Pittsburgh next and partner with Vapor to reach more US locations across its developing footprint (targeting 36 metros).

Efficiency and OpEx: The small increment of compute at the edge made efficiency a key consideration if Hivelocity was going to be able to do this profitably. The multi-tier partnership enabled Hivelocity to turn an infrastructure challenge entirely into OpEx and the existing integration and partnership with Digital Realty drove further efficiencies by making it possible to work with the same tools and management platform. It also benefits from the substantial research and development Vapor has conducted in choosing edge locations and selecting sites.

Micro data centers and service providers: Micro data center operators like Vapor continue to target service providers and CDNs as tenants. It is the best way to reach multiple customers and gain economies of scale – no small consideration given the logistics and overhead in getting out to the edge.

Hivelocity: The partnership enables Hivelocity to serve a wider range of customers and requirements across the core and edge. This is meaningful differentiation and opens up substantial opportunities.

Edge takeaways: This development is another good example of how partnerships will be critical for bringing together the various components of the edge computing ecosystem. It will be difficult to build all the pieces efficiently and the various tiers will have to piggyback on the scale and work of others. The other truth about edge this partnership demonstrates is the symbiotic relationship between the core and edge. Edge computing is not replacing the central cloud; edge is an extension of cloud and a critical one at that.

About the author:

Phil Shih is Managing Director and Founder of Structure Research, an independent research firm focused on the cloud, hosting and data center infrastructure service provider markets. (more)

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Article Topics

bare metal  |  cloud  |  Digital Realty  |  edge data center  |  edge PaaS  |  Hivelocity  |  interconnection  |  micro data center  |  Vapor IO