The Growing Demand for Edge Data Centers
With recent technology developments like IoT and video streaming services, latency has become a growing concern for data center operators. Organizations are looking for high-performance, cost-effective solutions to satisfy their clients’ needs, and edge data centers help meet this demand. In fact, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global market for edge data centers will more than triple by 2024, from $4M in 2017, to $13.5M, thanks to the potential for these smaller, localized data centers to reduce latency, overcome intermittent connections and store and compute data in proximity to the end user.
Some of the trends driving the growth of the edge data center industry include:
- Arrival of 5G - Edge data centers provide low cost and low latency support for high density 5G use cases, such as smart-city applications.
- The Internet of Things (IoT). Low-latency edge processing is key to managing the growing volume of data as an increasing number of IoT sensors and devices are installed in people’s home and other industrial settings
- Widening Data Gap. By allowing the data to be filtered close to the source, experts predict that low-cost edge data centers can help close the potential 64 zettabyte gap between global data center traffic and usable data created.
- Video Streaming, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The proximity of edge data centers helps reduce streaming latency and provides the performance that consumers and business users expect.
So What are Edge data centers, exactly?
Simply put, edge data centers are smaller facilities located closer to the populations they serve. They deliver cloud computing resources and cached content to end users. Typically connected to a larger, core data center, like our data centers in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, these facilities process data and services as close to the end user as possible. This means that organizations can reduce the latency of their service because they don’t need to move their data to data centers further away to process it, allowing for a better customer experience.
Use Cases for Edge Data Centers
Telecom enterprises and cloud service providers are expected to invest heavily in edge data centers in the upcoming years, helping them to speed up applications and enable new technology advancements, such as factory automation, video streaming or autonomous vehicles. However, there are many other industries and sectors that will also benefit from edge data centers, like health care, agriculture and mining.
With video streaming being more popular than ever, content delivery networks such as Netflix and Disney+ must now handle larger 4K videos. With edge data centers, these brands can ensure they deliver fast and high-quality content to consumers. Let’s also not forget the forever growing and evolving video game industry, where online gaming, server connection and other related services require low-latency connectivity.
In addition, while the healthcare industry may not commonly be associated with the latest technology innovations, it stands to benefit greatly from edge data centers. For example, adoption of telemedicine has grown rapidly, largely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And with this adoption, there is an increased demand for low-latency computing and security. To successfully improve telemedicine services, the healthcare industry requires more local infrastructure.
The Role of eStruxture
As the largest Canadian-owned, carrier and cloud-neutral data center provider in the country, eStruxture is in a unique position to satisfy the three main concerns of edge customers: neutrality, localization, and data security.
eStruxture operates a total of 14 facilities across Canada, with a total footprint of over 650,000 square feet of combined data center space and a total IT capacity of 100 megawatts. eStruxture’s data centers offer both central and edge locations that are highly connected, scalable and sustainably designed. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your business, or if you’re looking to become a part of the eStruxture ecosystem, please contact us here.