The speed of 5G’s development and the driving force behind it have already exceeded our imagination. Why is 5G so important? We believe it will unleash numerous business and technology opportunities, and IoT, AI, big data and edge computing will all have huge development opportunities.

5G networks will reach speeds as high 20 Gbits per second, support 1 million devices per square kilometer, and provide 1 msec latency, unleashing the age of IoT. Everything will be impacted by 5G from high-performance cloud data centers to core and access networks to edge services and smart devices.

Unleashing innovation

Accenture calculates that 5G will add $500 billion to US GDP annually enabling new industries and revitalizing old ones. New applications will include autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture, and immersive entertainment. Fast, reliable communication with guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) promise usher in new applications such as connected ambulances, robotic surgery, and widespread use of drones and automated carts for autonomous delivery applications.

Re-thinking distributed application services

In addition to new application areas, 5G will also affect existing applications and services. For applications in HPC and analytics, network capacity has historically placed an upper boundary on computing and data handling requirements. For example, an HPC application can only collect so much remote sensor data over a slow network, and a ridesharing app can only call an AI prediction service so many times per minute. With 5G networks, these constraints will go out the window, and the amount of data to be collected, processed, and analyzed will soar.

This “data deluge” will impact the full range of traditional HPC applications. For example, inexpensive IoT sensors will provide natural disaster warning systems with more frequent, higher-resolution data improving forecast accuracy for everything from extreme weather to earthquakes to tsunamis to volcanos.

5G will have predictable impacts on infrastructure

With over 20 billion IoT devices expected by 2025, today’s cloud data centers cannot scale to support 5G use cases. The exploitation of 5G will only be possible with modern, HPC capable infrastructure close to the network edge.

As 5G technology is introduced, we can make some educated guesses about how data center services will need to evolve to keep pace:

• New content services – The back-end services that support new 5G applications will need to be much more scalable than their 4G counterparts. These high-performance services will likely be built using many of the same cloud-native tools and techniques used to build scalable cloud services today.
• Compute, and storage shifts to the edge – Given the real-time nature of 5G use cases, along with tiered cloud services, HPC-capable infrastructure will be needed near the network edge. To simplify management, service providers will want to manage this on-premises edge infrastructure the same way as they manage cloud services.
• Increased need for Data Management and Analytics – To accommodate larger data volumes, 5G services will need high-performance data management solutions such as HPC-oriented file systems, object stores, and distributed NoSQL datastores. Users will need tools that make it earlier to deploy and manage distributed data management and analytic frameworks at scale.
• Security at the edge becomes critical – As services migrate from well-protected cloud data centers to the network edge, security will become a critical consideration. This will be especially true as 5G networks evolve to support critical applications such as traffic control systems, industrial applications, and healthcare. Operators will need to forward deploy security technologies on par with the most sophisticated cloud operators.

At Attom, we have developed and delivered a wide range of micro-data center products for the application of edge computing. Please contact us to find out how can we help you build an edge micro data center.

(Original from here )