μDCs : An opportunity ahead for Edge Computing.

A Micro-datacentre (μDC) is a smaller, containerised based datacentre system that is designed to solve different sets of problems or to take on different types of workload that cannot be handled by traditional facilities or even large modular datacentres.

A μDC minimizes the physical footprint and energy consumed by the traditional model and μDC to be worth $6.3bn USD by 2020 says research.

What is μDC ?

μDC are standalone rack-level systems containing all the components of a ‘traditional’ data center, including on board cooling, telecommunication and storage systems, security, fire suppression, and uninterrupted power supply, whereas an average container-based mDC hosts dozens of servers and thousands of virtual machines (VMs) within a 40ft shipping container, a mDCincludes fewer than 10 servers and less than 100 VMs in a single 19 in box. Just like containerised dcs, μDC come with in-built security systems, cooling systems and flood and fire protection.

Origin of μDC

The origin of a μDC is to take a standard rack-mount infrastructure and add capabilities that a standard rack or a converged system would struggle to provision, creating a self-contained platform where a containerized solution would be too large or expensive for on demand

Need of μDC

The industry is seeing increasing use of modular or containerized server systems, with company such as Microsoft using a combination of approaches for its DCs.

Moving away from complicated DCs containing multitudinous servers, storage and network devices that required purchasing, implementing and maintaining, enterprises are seeing the advantages of these pre-designed, fully functioning “pioneered and unified systems”.

These pioneered and unified systems systems can come in many guises. The older, more traditional view of an engineered system would be of the mainframe or mini-computer, self-contained with its own compute and storage capabilities, with network interface cards (NICs) present to connect the system to the rest of the world. A more modern approach is through the use of converged systems, such as Cisco’s UCS, VCE’s V-Blocks or Dell’s Active Systems. These are pre-integrated, pre-built systems that can be implemented and used rapidly within an existing datacentre – provided that suitable space, power distribution and cooling are available.

Another mode of deployment is containerized systems: a standard road/shipping container packed with all the required equipment that just needs plugging into the mains and sometimes water for it to become operational. The container is otherwise self-contained; once it has done its job or its capabilities are no longer enough for the job, it can be removed from the rest of the system and replaced with relative ease.

But these options do not suit all needs. They are all primarily aimed at the larger end of the market, yet many small and medium-sized enterprises would like easier access to acquire, implement and run systems that can be used as stand-alone platforms without needing a specific datacentre facility. Even large companies may need a more specific system that enables them to run a more physical workload or to airlock an application from the rest of the technology platform for reasons such as data security.

Companies such as Rittal and ASTModular cater for this market. AST’s μDC offering – Smart Bunker is designed to host 85 VMs within a 42U rack assembly, while other newer μDCs are even smaller – is 23U size deployed in a single rack enclosure.

Each system provides a secure enclosure that is self-contained with heat management and insulation, with low-cost energy management.

Many have optional extras, such as defense against external fire and flood threats, as well as bio metric entry systems and fully monitored events, such as any attempt to vandalise the system or to move it from its deployed position.

Benefit of μDC

A company without a physical datacentre could use a self-contained μDC to gain the flexibility of having multiple servers, along with required storage and networking, in a single unit that can be positioned pretty much anywhere in its building. Even where an organisation is looking at using a co-location facility, the extra security and disaster-proofing that a μDC can offer might be worth looking into. 

In a world where it is getting increasingly difficult to pick the right mix of physical and virtual platforms for your business’ needs, μDC may be seen as just another confusing tool in the box. However, they make sense for specific types of workload and for specific types of environment.

μDC may not come into play too much for large enterprises overhauling their big facilities,; they are more suitable for SMEs without datacentres, or for a big enterprise’s remote branch that is located in a developing, or natural disaster-prone,area.

The age of build-your-own, based on racks with self-assembled compute, storage and network components, is well on the way out.  Modularisation, along with the use of external cloud-based systems, is the future. The key is to ensure that datacentre professionals choose the right mix.

Resolving Mobile Computing

At the core a micro data center, or cloudlet or μDC, is a rack of servers available at thousands of locations around the world, never more than a few milliseconds away from the client devices. The mDC is connected to the “classical” mega data center i.e. the cloud via a low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet connection. The software running in these mDCs supports multi-tenancy, which means different services from different providers can be supported simultaneously. 

Client devices including smartphones, wearable computers, and other IoT devices can use an μDC both as a computing resource as well as a caching resource.

Resolving Applications envision

Well-known services and applications such as Bing search, Office 365, Azure services etc., will all benefit from these cloud accelerators. In addition, any application that requires heavy use of computation (CPU, GPU, memory) and battery will also benefit.  For example vision-based applications, video and sensor analytics, speaker recognition, etc.  When wireless bandwidth cost is an issue, offloading computation to mDCs will reduce spectrum usage.  By offloading computation, battery life on the end devices will improve as they will do less work, assuming that the energy cost of computation is more than the communications cost.

Edge computing can also benefit remote office or remote branch office environments and organizations that have a geographically dispersed user base. In such a scenario, intermediary μDC can be installed at remote locations to replicate cloud services locally, improving performance and the ability for a device to act upon perishable data in fractions of a second. Depending upon the vendor and technical implementation, the intermediary may be referred to by one of several names including edge gateway, base station,hub, cloudlet or aggregator.