Standing at the Edge? Look at the ROI Before You Leap into edge deployments

Edge topology is spread among multiple locations and devices to allow data processing and service delivery close to the data source or computing device. Edge locations are usually unsupervised and less secure than traditional data centers, making it difficult to quickly discover and remediate issues. Today’s decentralization requires new approaches in management. Old best practices don’t apply to these locations.

Edge Computing Challenges

Between delivering reduced latency, ensuring localized and distributed data and service availability, and greatly improving data center scalability, the benefits and value of edge deployments are clear. Yet, edge computing deployments that are in unmanned remote locations present IT professionals with three unique and significant challenges.

1. Asset management: In addition to considerations of load balancing, capacity management, and energy use issues, a key aspect of managing edge equipment is logistics — simply keeping track of the number and physical location of the equipment and devices connected to the network. The physical distance and distributed nature of edge data centers and devices mean that any activity requiring personnel to physically interact with assets is automatically more complicated and expensive.
2. Real-Time space monitoring: Because a remote location is likely understaffed or unstaffed by IT professionals, monitoring of the location’s conditions is challenging, especially when there may be a security threat. The ability to monitor, mitigate, escalate, and resolve security issues is limited.
3. Environmental conditions: Many things can contribute to changes in the environmental conditions around equipment. Heat generation can outpace the capacity of existing cooling systems; computer room air conditioning systems can fail; power failures and even leaky pipes can disrupt environments. The remote nature of these facilities means increased time to respond and resolve unanticipated environmental changes.

Creating the Soft Landing (ROI)

No matter which equipment, devices, or platforms are included in the definition of the edge, the risks and challenges of managing the edge require the same skills as managing the disparate complexities of data centers. However, those skills are used differently. The reduced amount of technology in each edge data center might require fewer hands to manage, yet requires increased skills to understand how the edge facilities support and impact other edge areas and the central data center. Each also requires physical changes and maintenance, via remotely enabled visibility that software, video, and phone support alone cannot provide.

The major return on investment for monitoring your edge computing resources is cost savings. Downtime is expensive — the Uptime Institute reports that about a third of outages cost over $250,000. And this return on investment is three-fold: reduced energy costs from more efficient control of air temperatures and humidity, proactive response to hazards, and maximizing the lifecycle and use of your IT equipment.

• Energy: Because of the importance of cooling IT equipment, many data centers and edge facilities operate with unnecessarily low temperatures, wasting energy (and money) because they err on the side of caution rather than risking downtime from overheating. With increased monitoring, operators can get more granular temperature data and track the temperatures of individual devices or the micro-environments within server racks. This additional visibility enables you to increase the temperature set points in the facility while ensuring the equipment is cooled properly. Power use accounts for 70%-80% percent of ongoing operational costs within a traditional data center or edge facilities, so any reduction in cooling reduces power use and saves money.
• Disaster/hazard mitigation: Disaster prevention is better than disaster recovery. Whether that’s dealing with environmental conditions that could threaten downtime, such as increasing temperatures on a specific device or increasing humidity within a facility or identifying unexpectedly missing assets, real-time monitoring and alerts to changes enable a swift response before the situation gets out of hand. This is especially critical in edge facilities, which are usually remote from the central data center and IT support teams. Responding may require deploying a team to the location or notifying local resources to assist — both of which add to response time.
• Maximizing IT equipment: Managing assets across multiple locations increases the chance of error – when assets are being transported back and forth, they could get lost in transit. Missing or failing assets, whether they have been misplaced or are sitting in storage forgotten and unused, can lead to service outages and unnecessary costs for new hardware.

While the concept and use of edge computing have been around a while, its benefits and uses for businesses are finally hitting their stride. There’s no question that edge computing is creating new and improved ways for businesses to maximize operational efficiency, improve performance and safety, and automate business processes. That’s a great value proposition for businesses that want to stay competitive.

About the author

Dale Quayle is CEO of RF Code where he is responsible for the overall vision and strategy of the company as well as overseeing the launch of new products and the company’s entrance into new markets. Previously, he was CEO of Digital Fuel SV LLC, Interset Inc., as well as Intergrien Corp. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

DISCLAIMER: Guest posts are submitted content. The views expressed in this post are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of Edge Industry Review (EdgeIR.com). 

Article Topics

device management  |  edge computing  |  energy efficiency  |  facilities management  |  RFCode  |  ROI  |  security