CV_JulAug_21_3

H ave you ever given up loading a website or watching a movie because it wouldn’t load? You’re not alone. Network performance, scalability at speed for IT environments and infrastructure, capability to reach out to users and offer faster, reliable services are some of the major pain points enterprises and over-the-top (OTT) provid- ers still suffer. These challenges have one thing in common: an exponential growth of internet usage and production of data. It is all about data. Data generated by gaming platforms, virtual reality (VR) environments, financial trading systems, internet of things (IoT) applications, vehicle telemetry, remote surgeries, the list goes on to an endless number of use cases, some of which we can’t even think about today. To keep up with the storage demands stemming from all this data creation, IDC forecasts that more than 22 Zettabits (ZB) of storage capacity must ship across all media types from 2018 to 2025, with nearly 59 percent of that capacity supplied from the hard disc drive industry. With some applications being time critical – such as driverless cars, financial trading and remote surgery – several enterprises experience some rocky service provi- sioning. But what if there is a solution? First, there is. Secondly, it is becoming widely avail- able week by week. This solution is the emergence of data centers at the edge, or edge computing. By Dennis Chan MAPPING THE EDGE 5G edge computing doesn’t exist without network infrastructure aggregation MOBILE & WIRELESS 26 CHANNEL V ISION | July - August 2021