The edge is fast becoming the next major business and technology frontier. Phrases like “we expect the most growth at the edge,” “gain insights at the edge” and “monetize the edge” have become quite common to hear. And the continued expansion of smart monitoring technologies at almost every endpoint from retail, to traffic lights, to manufacturing floors, continues to create more data at the edge.
In fact, IDC expects that more than 50% of new IT infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023. As this growth continues, infrastructure technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams are working together to face new challenges like managing multiple siloed solutions at distributed end points, creating strategies to tame the unintentional architectures springing up as businesses race to create insights from data and efficiently administering different operating systems, models and data sources.
Today, we are introducing the new Dell EMC VxRail satellite node, extending the benefits of VxRail seen in the core data center to address even more edge use cases, generating value where it’s needed most by bringing VxRail efficiency, automation and operational simplicity to single node edge use cases and streamlining operations across your VMware ecosystem.
Extend data center operations to your edge
As businesses adopt and expand their edge environment, many do so in a piecemeal manner. This results in management, scale and security complexities. Who manages remote sites? How do you manage at scale? And how do you address security concerns across every edge location? VxRail solutions simplify this by extending the same data center type automation, operations, single click lifecycle management and health monitoring across your distributed VxRail environments to make management and scaling easy. And cyber-resilience is integrated with intrinsic standards and security built into every layer of the stack along with integrated backup, recovery and hardening scripts.
Realize data center performance and workload consolidation to your edge
In many instances edge environments have sprung up out of necessity to rapidly address emerging business opportunities, often adding to the number of silos and hardware sprawl. Here again we can learn from work Dell Technologies has done in thousands of data centers to help address this hardware proliferation. Powerful VxRail nodes enable high workload consolidation on a single platform. Plus, VxRail with Intel Optane technologies makes managing massive data inputs possible with low-latency data throughput and puts the infrastructure in place to help you achieve real-time data processing where it’s created.
Deliver data center optimization and cost efficiency to your edge
Balancing the value of the information that can be created with cost and efficiency is top of mind for many customers. By eliminating cluster requirements and reducing licensing costs, the VxRail satellite node immediately lowers the initial outlay of capital. However, similar to the data center, it is often the ongoing operational expense that is like the rest of the iceberg that we don’t see under the water. With VxRail, you can leverage operational and financial investments from core locations, enabling the same teams that manage your data center environments to manage your distributed edge. Additionally, you can plan your edge strategy once and then self-deploy many times over matching timelines to projects and opportunities. The engineering, testing and validation is covered by Dell Technologies from core to edge with multiple generations of nodes supported, guaranteed long term interoperability and a robust road map.
IT teams have been addressing these challenges in the data center for years. As businesses have grown, and technology accelerated, they have had to work to find ways to accommodate. Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been helping customers like Fletcher Carr, Chief OT & Process Computing Engineer at BlueScope, grow, consolidate, automate and simplify their business model for the last 6 years. “As a leading manufacturer of painted and coated steel products, our facilities can tolerate very little unscheduled downtime. Standardizing on VxRail across locations gives our teams in production confidence knowing they have a trusted partner for support, thousands of hours of engineering behind them and the simplicity of VxRail operation in a VMware environment.”
Operationalize your edge with VxRail
As the only HCI solution jointly engineered with VMware, VxRail satellite nodes extend the same operational model and efficiencies to edge sites while automating day-to-day operations, health monitoring and lifecycle management from a centralized location without the need for local technical and specialized resources.
With digital transformation underway in most enterprises, workloads expanding outside of traditional data centers and the proliferation of 5G networks, there is an immediate need for a small footprint, low-cost, easy-to-manage infrastructure solution. By extending standardized and architected VxRail solutions from the data center to the edge, the IT silos typically found are considerably reduced and unintentional architectures (or sprawl) becomes a thing of the past. We are excited to invite you to learn more about VxRail satellite nodes to see how they can efficiently consolidate and remove siloed infrastructure, simplify management and implement robust configurations to analyze data at the edge.