Touring a Mini Data Center for Mobile Edge Computing

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- Edge computing is one of the telecom industry's hottest buzzwords today. But what does edge computing actually look like?

EdgeMicro is one of several startups looking to cash in on the edge computing trend, and to juice its efforts in the space, the company built a fully functional edge computing data center in Englewood, Colo., on the outskirts of Denver. BitBox, Cisco, Fiber Mountain, Flexential and Megaport are among the companies that are running edge computing tests in EdgeMicro's new edge computing data center.

Light Reading visited EdgeMicro's data center, and here's what we found.

Figure 1: Edge Computing Box

EdgeMicro's edge computing data center is essentially stored inside a big steel shipping container, like the kind of shipping containers that can be placed on cargo ships, railroad cars or 18-wheelers. It's located immediately outside of Flexential's massive data center in Englewood, Colo. (meaning, it's literally about five feet away from one of the side exits to Flexential's data center).

EdgeMicro built its test edge computing data center here because the company has an agreement with Flexential to use Flexential's power and internet hookups. In a real-world deployment, EdgeMicro's data centers would be located in a parking lot or other location with fiber and power -- places where massive data centers wouldn't fit -- in order to provide computing services to nearby users.

— Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies, Light Reading | @mikeddano