Stretching Workloads From Data Center and Cloud to the Edge
Digital Realty, Vapor IO, and Hivelocity partner on core-to-edge bare-metal platform
Data center service provider Digital Realty is working with Vapor IO and Hivelocity to enable organizations to develop and run applications that can stretch from core data centers to the cloud and the fast-growing compute edge via bare-metal clouds.
The Lowdown: The partnership between the three companies will enable telecommunications companies and other businesses to more easily and efficiently extend low-latency applications and services out to the edge and tie them back to their cloud environments and core data centers.
The Details: The initiative brings together Digital Realty’s year-old PlatformDigital – an infrastructure platform aimed at helping customers scale their digital businesses – Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge, a hardware and software platform for edge services, and Hivelocity’s bare-metal cloud services.
The vendors this month demonstrated the core-to-edge bare metal initiative in Atlanta and have similar efforts ongoing in Chicago and Dallas, with plans to expand.
The combination of technologies offers customers core-to-edge capabilities that are key to emerging edge use cases. As an example, the vendors said that a developer can now deploy a multi-tier applications that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and runs low-latency inference tasks in Vapor IO edge locations while training AI models in Digital Realty’s regional edge and core data centers.
The Impact: The edge is expanding rapidly as demand grows for putting compute, storage, networking, and software capabilities closer to where much of the data is now being created. The proliferation of mobile devices, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), the increasingly distributed nature of IT, and the rise of emerging technologies like AI and analytics are contributing to the need to find ways to collect, store, analyze, and gain insights into all the data being generated.
IDC analysts expect worldwide spending on edge computing will grow an average of 12.5% between now and 2024, when it will reach $250.6 billion.
Background: The partnership between the three vendors comes five months after Digital Realty and Vapor IO announced joint core-to-edge solutions in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas, the fruits of a partnership that was announced in October 2019. Hivelocity, a customer of Digital Realty, was able to extend its bare-metal cloud to Vapor IO’s edge locations due to the integration already done by Digital Realty and Vapor IO.
The Buzz: “Leveraging the joint solution available through Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge and Digital Realty’s PlatformDigital, we were able to lower costs and get to market quicker,” Hivelocity COO Steve Eschweiler said. “By using our existing control plane in Digital Realty’s facilities to orchestrate machines in Vapor IO’s data centers at the infrastructure edge, leveraging the integrated Digital Realty Service Exchange and Kinetic Edge Exchange networks for connectivity, we were able to quickly and cost-effectively extend our bare-metal cloud to the infrastructure edge, where last-mile telco networks are aggregated.”
“We designed this joint solution to combine the data center and networking infrastructure needed to enable cloud-to-core-to-edge applications,” Vapor IO founder and CEO Cole Crawford said. “Hivelocity’s ability to simply and effectively extend its bare-metal cloud to the edge in Atlanta is a perfect example of how we’re making it easier for joint customers to deliver low-latency edge services that tie back to their regional and core workloads.”
“The combination of Vapor’s Kinetic Edge and Digital Realty’s PlatformDigital is a crucial building block for core-to-edge workloads, which we are actively supporting in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas,” Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp said. “Hivelocity’s ability to tap into this service and create a clear path to highly interconnected true core-to-edge infrastructure for their customers is precisely the simplicity we hope to provide.”
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