The edge manifesto calls for the placement of content, compute and data center resources on the edge of the network, closer to concentrations of users. This augmentation of the traditional centralized data center model ensures a better user experience demanded by digital business.
Overview
Key Findings
Gartner’s Nexus of Forces is driving the convergence and mutual reinforcement of mobile, social, cloud and information in support of consumerization and the democratization of IT, while raising user expectations, emphasizing contentrich data types, and creating increased volume of information and transactions.
Digital business takes these elements and applies them to support new business models stemming from information, and places them as critical pieces of core business offerings, with an emphasis on timely and accurate delivery.
Moving data centers’ processing and content delivery/collection closer to the sources and sinks of this information, including cloud onramps and offramps, offers significant benefits and spawns new business models. This is the essence of the “edge manifesto.”
The use of smaller, distributed, connected data centers (perhaps space in colocation centers), closer to concentrations of users and generators of content (“pushing things to the edge”), will be required for these workloads. In many cases, these will augment, not replace, the more traditional large data center.
Recommendations
Invest in architecture and technologies that help to address the increased criticality and user experience that digital business demands.
Crossfunctional collaboration is required, so ensure that edge planning efforts fall under a crossskilled engineering team or an architect who oversees compute, cloud and networking as well as business applications; “plan in silos, fail as an organization.”
Ensure the architecture addresses the three “location” challenges, as outlined in this research.
Leverage best practices from vertical industries that use the Internet to deliver video or rich media.
