Data center is facing enormous challenges and opportunities brought by new technologies and new demands. The development and application of 5G, AI and IoT technology put forward new requirements for data center. We need to rethink how traditional data centers are designed and deployed. To meet the needs of low latency and localization, deploying many smaller distributed data centers, often referred to as Edge Data Centers (EDC), seems to be the most feasible solution.

TIA (Telecommunications Industry Associations) published this position paper: Edge Data Centers, as an overview defining development, implementation, and operational aspects of EDCs. EDCs share many attributes with larger, more traditional DC facilities, but they are designed to support widely distributed (usually cloud-based) services, and there are many new considerations presented that require industry attention to develop best practices and standards:

1. Location
2. Physical and Logical Security
3. Operational Risk Factors and Considerations
4. Critical Infrastructure Considerations

TIA views “ICT industry expect to see massive deployment of EDCs in the foreseeable future. The Edge does not stand alone but is connected forming an interoperable fabric extending f rom device to core to cloud.”

And TIA reaches to these conclusions:

1. Increased scale and scope coupled with reduced latency dependent, broadly distributed critical services will require many EDCs
2. Automation, parallel architecture and standards will be needed to meet availability requirements
3. Energy efficient design and operations must be a high priority especially in view of the anticipated scale of EDC deployments

View here the detail paper of “Edge Data Centers”  [Source: TIA]

At Attom, we are focusing on the edge data center infrastructure design and fabrication. Check with us to see how can we help with you edge data center projects.