Bringing Interconnection to the Edge

Chris Sharp, CTO
November 7, 2019

Solve Data Gravity with proximity

We have discovered that companies who do not design for data gravity first will not succeed in the digital transformation of their business. It’s a fundamental challenge first identified by Dave McCrory at VMware. Data attracts applications and services, and the greater the distance between applications and services creates latency issues, and the greater the volume of interaction with data creates throughput issues. As the density of data, applications and services increases, the more difficult it becomes to move the data. Which translates to companies needing to support and maintain many centers of data where they have business presence around the world. In fact, by 2025, Gartner estimates that 75% of all enterprise IT generated data will be created outside of the cloud and legacy on-prem data centers. They recommend IT strategies shift to creating centers of data within proximity of the cloud and the edge.

Rewire the network edge to core

Digital Business requires a new enterprise network architecture. One that is localized at global points of business presence, consolidates traffic flows and end point management, and interconnected in Network Hubs on Platform Digital.

This reduces latency and increases throughput, necessary to support the exploding volume and highly interactive traffic behaviors of digital business workflows. The strategy brings users, systems, and the network to the data, which removes barriers of data gravity and creates centers of data exchange to scale digital business.

Extend centers of data exchange to the edge

By deploying Network Hubs on Platform Digital, enterprises create centers of data exchange to scale distributed workflows. These centers of data exchange are an ideal meeting place to extend connections to the edge, making possible new distributed workflows spanning from core to edge to scale digital business.

To enable this, Digital Realty has integrated Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge Exchange as part of Platform Digital’s Network Hub Solution. This unified solution implements the Kinetic Edge SDN fabric to connect and coordinate traffic exchange between Platform Digital and Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge deployments.

As a result, endpoint workloads computed at the Kinetic Edge are passed to the Network Hub to connect to upstream workflow processing, data analysis and retention.

Network hub featuring Vapor IO’s kinetic edge

The Network Hub featuring the Vapor IO Kinetic Edge Exchange enables interconnection and coordination between the edge and key centers of data exchange to unlock new distributed workflows to scale digital business.

The combination of the two firms’ capabilities provide unique benefits including:

• Bring the enterprise to the edge to unlock new opportunities
• Secure interconnection between Platform Digital and the Kinetic Edge
• Extend Platform Digital to the edge using the Kinetic Edge’s capabilities
• Make possible new distributed workflows spanning from core to edge

Enable pervasive datacenter architecture on PlatformDIGITAL globally

Platform Digital interconnects, integrates and standardizes our capabilities as a global experience across all of campuses to help solve data gravity and scale digital business. Platform Digital helps our customers be in control, be connected and be optimized wherever they need to deploy, connect and host their digital infrastructure.

The Platform Digital Solution enables customers to implement a Pervasive Data Architecture Strategy, one that brings users, things, networks, clouds and controls to the data at centers of data exchange, removing data gravity barriers and scaling digital business.