Schneider Electric, a major supplier to everyone in the data center space, sees a rush to identify and build out edge data centers.

July 25, 2018

7 Min Read
The Great Edge Computing Land Grab

While much of the industry is focused on the technology involved in developing edge computing, there is also a quiet land grab underway to identify the best locations for more localized aggregation of computing and storage power, according to one major vendor.

Schneider Electric is a supplier to the broad range of companies engaged with edge computing from the network operators themselves to Internet giants, enterprises and tower owners, providing power infrastructure plus building management and automation. Its EcoStruxure platform is used for six domains -- Power, IT, Building, Machine, Plant and Grid -- across many different industries.

And that gives Joe Reele, vice president of Datacenter Solution Architects at Schneider, a pretty good perspective of what is happening at the edge of the network, as the telecom industry tries to sort out not only how edge computing comes together but where.

"Schneider Electric serves the entire market from Internet giants to enterprises to colocation to cloud-hosting facilities and so we are incredibly knowledgeable by working with all of those clients and we are leveraging some of the business challenges to help the industry, in general, to come up with a better way to handle it," Reele says. "I'm talking to these executives all the time about the challenges they are facing."

Figure 1: Schneider Electric's Joe Reele Schneider Electric's Joe Reele

What he is seeing is a move by a variety of companies to quietly identify and purchase the real estate needed to provide edge computing at sites between the widely distributed cell towers and either the local Central Office or a regional data center. The need for these aggregation sites, in Reele's mind, is twofold: providing a centralized place for the disaggregated baseband units of Cloud Radio Access Networks, and enabling interconnection to multiple networks, along with the compute/storage required.

"One of the biggest arms races that is taking place right now is not technology, it's not fiber; the arms race is basically on real estate right now," Reele tells Light Reading in an interview. "It's finding those locations, buying that real estate, that building. It might be an old building that has six different pieces of fiber coming into it down in the basement somewhere. Smart people are scouring the country right now to find those places."

Tiers of edges
The Schneider Electric exec says these sites will be part of the broader ecosystem that includes converted Central Offices and regional data centers operated by the companies such as Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) and Digital Realty Trust Inc. , each of which will have some role to play, depending on the market.

There is already edge computing being distributed to cell towers, by companies such as Vertical Bridge and Data Bank, who are partnering to bring micro data centers to the tower infrastructure in support of C-RAN, which will separate the distributed radio heads from the baseband units.

Reele points out that most of the 250,000 cell towers serve multiple wireless operators, but many don't serve all of them, and they don't offer cross-connection between them at the tower. That means companies that want to distribute content and applications closer to the customer will be looking for more connected sites, at which content can hop from network to network.

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He sees a rise in sites that can serve as "BBU hotels" for the baseband units of the C-RAN architecture, as well as a point of interconnection for content distribution. In some markets, a centrally located telco CO, converted to a data center, may also serve this purpose.

"The Verizon CO in Dallas might become a BBU hotel and it serves all of the towers in the Dallas market versus the way it used to be where you had RAN at every tower," he notes. "Wireless operators using their own COs would be one location. A second location very well could be those regional colocation data centers, where they have a bunch of cross-connects and a bunch of dark fibers and there is an ability to get a bunch of networks and all that kind of stuff."

But Reele says smart companies are also figuring out if existing infrastructure is there to provide these smaller data center sites, in the 250 kilowatts to 1-megawatt range or if such buildings can be built and, if so, where's the best location to get the maximum connectivity.

"People will talk about technology this, 5G that, blah blah blah," he says. "I think they are overlooking one of the most important pieces. If I am not in the right place with the right things, I'm out of the game. It's pretty simple -- it doesn't get any more complicated than that."

Next page: EdgeConneX in action

EdgeConneX in action
One obvious player in this segment is EdgeConneX Inc. , which has been building edge data centers for some time and continued to look for sites at which to build smaller data centers, initially for content, serving both Internet giants and cable operators, primarily. In an interview earlier this year, Phill Lawson-Shanks, chief innovation officer for EdgeConneX, said that his company absolutely would leverage its heritage in building data centers to serve this smaller edge, even as it also scales up some of its original "edge" locations to be much larger campuses.

"We have access rights to thousands of buildings in North America and we have the innate knowledge and experience of how to deal with the multiple municipalities to penetrate buildings, get rights of way, etc.," he commented.

That expertise includes building its electrical rooms in containers that can easily be dropped into a site, turned up and then scaled up, to reduce the build cycle time to days, Lawson-Shanks said. EdgeConneX also has its own Edge OS, built to monitor a lights-out data center and designed to scale up to a campus build or down to "manage something the size of a mini-fridge," he added. "So it can sit on a cell tower, on top of a building or inside a building."

These distributed sites "are the perfect location for up-to-the-minute content for search engines, content providers to put microservices down there in caches," Lawson-Shanks noted, and can also be the aggregation points for the many more 5G antennas that will be required.

Figure 2: Source: OrbTV, powered by Light Reading Source: OrbTV, powered by Light Reading

"The challenge that a lot of the people professing to be micro edge providers is that, to get an enclosure and put it on a piece of land is pretty easy," he said. "The difficulty is maintaining the integrity of that enclosure -- the security, the environmentals. That is the hardest part of it."

Schneider Electric's Reele agrees that there will be fundamental differences in these new edge data facilities with which the industry is still grappling. He believes his company has the expertise to share there as well.

"Data centers have been forever engineered for humans to be in them -- security guards, IT professionals, electrical professionals, mechanical professionals, Reele notes. "If we are going to go to all the cell towers, hypothetically, there is going to be one at every tower, that's 250,000 locations -- do you think we are going to put a security guard at every one? An IT guy at every one, a mechanical/electrical guy? Therefore, the autonomous edge requires the different engineering, a different operational and a different maintenance model in order for it to be maximized efficiency. We think we are a world leader in understanding and developing the entire model, the lifecycle model of the autonomous edge."

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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