Page 12 - FCW, November/December 2020

EDGE COMPUTING
Streamlining the adoption of edge
computing
Hyperconverged infrastructure and open source are fueling the rise in edge technology
Garrett Clark
Practice Lead, OpenShift Virtualization, Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Red Hat North American Public Sector
In edge computing, this overhead is a deal breaker. For example, it’s impossible to combine all three areas into a device that fits in a backpack or military vehicle for travel to a remote site — unless we turn to hyperconverged infrastructure, which is a key element in the move to edge computing.
Hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute, networking and storage into a single package. In fact, it is the reason
why edge computing can start to work. Furthermore, it streamlines the deployment of multiple environments and simplifies long-term maintenance, enabling non- technical employees to operate it.
The innovative nature
of open source
Open source is a necessary component
of edge computing for two main reasons. First, open source is much more secure than its proprietary counterparts due
to the increased transparency. For edge deployments with hundreds or even thousands of sites, initially securing and maintaining them are solved through Red Hat open source.
Second, open source supports a level
of innovation most proprietary systems simply can’t match. When thousands of people work on a technology, that gives it a substantial advantage in terms of new ideas and accelerated innovation.
Red Hat’s expertise across all those components puts us in a somewhat unique position in the industry. With the various elements of Red Hat OpenShift’s family of containerization software, we can run virtual machines next to containers, fully integrated with storage and packaged
FOR ORGANIZATIONS at all levels of government, mission outcomes hinge on the ability to
collect, analyze and make decisions based on data. That ability has implications across a broad range of scenarios, including smart cities, military operations, signal analysis
in the intelligence community and the collection of weather data to keep people safe from natural disasters.
Edge computing has a vital role to play in the success of those efforts because it
allows agencies to process data at the edge rather than sending it back to a data center or public cloud. By speeding analysis, it facilitates faster, better decisions. Edge computing can also lead to the collection of more targeted, relevant data.
The role of hyperconvergence
In a traditional data center, compute, networking and storage are three
separate silos, typically requiring three administrators and three sets of hardware.
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