The Growing Need for Edge Data Centers in the United States

The United States of America is a coalition of 50 states, has a population of 325.7 million and an internet penetration of 89 %. The United States is the biggest region for connectivity in the world. It is home to financial hubs like New York and Chicago, the technology hubs of Bay area in San Francisco, and in Seattle and Portland, the population hubs in Dallas and Los Angeles, and also the government center in Washington DC/ Virginia. The United States is the undisputed” home of the Internet” with the maximum number of data centers in the world.

The recent disruptions in the technological front have driven the digital economy of the country towards an astronomical growth. This growth also implies a similar growth in data generation which is being absorbed by growth in data centers.

The state generating the maximum data in the United States will have to be California- home to Silicon Valley, a sturdy market in LA and San Francisco and countless data-intensive companies including Google, Apple, and Facebook. This will also make it home to the maximum number of data centers and the ideal prospect for all new data center trends.

The profound usage of connected devices and the growth of digital segment demand the data to be constantly transmitted to the data center and back, and the sheer volume of connectivity and continuous usage requires this transit to be swift and free from latency. This is tackled by edge computing. The changing economy and way of life drives the increased adoption of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, food delivery systems, driverless vehicles, and mapping apps.

California because of its huge and growing data generation will see resources being poured in, in data center infrastructure including edge data centers as data centers are the backbone of a digital economy. With consumers demanding high bandwidth services and businesses demanding for high capacity data processing the demand for edge is at an all-time high. The abundance of IoT-integrated devices has made way into all the industry verticals like healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, education, etc making way for the edge in the process.

The Need for Edge

So why would we need edge data centers in California, which is already brimming with data centers?

Albeit the concept of the edge data center is defined as locating storage and processing geographically close to the end user, it has a broader definition beyond encountering latency and network congestion.  There is a lot of data, but we do not need to store all of it. We need intelligent edge data centers to get the right data to the right place at the right time and act accordingly on it, not piling everything in the centralized data center.

1. Keeping the heaviest and latency-sensitive traffic at the network edge instead of the central data center, providing quick processing and responsiveness.
2. To reduce the cost associated with the transit of the data.
3. To improve the customer experience, although fast internet is available in bigger cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles it is important to eliminate latency in smaller cities like Fresno and Bakersfield too.
4. Edge tailors its demands for both small and medium-sized businesses, needing expansion and also to carriers that will expand their wireless infrastructure to support 5G.
5. It makes data centers flexible in a way that now applications can define the data center structure.
6. Edge accommodates the new age digital disruptions like 5G, Artificial intelligence, AR/VR, etc.

EdgeCenter by Prasa

Prasa’s has developed its self-contained, prefabricated, turnkey, micro-modular data center enclosed in a container, with integrated cooling, power, and IT space.  It is a scalable data center solution which can be deployed for multiple purposes:

• Facilities with time constraints – Building a data center from scratch can be very time and resource intensive. Opting for EdgeCenter which is factory made helps the organizations meet their requirements at the earliest possible.
• Data centers that are out of space – Existing data centers that are out of physical space or need to expand their power or cooling capacity deploy EdgeCenter to meet these requirements.
• Data centers functioning in rented or leased locations – It will not make sense to spend money on fixed assets if the organization will need to relocate. EdgeCenters in such cases can be deployed and can be easily transported in the future.
• Facilities suffering from very high PUE – EdgeCenter offers a very low PUE and it can replace the energy-intensive units of existing infrastructure, to increases the efficiency and reduce the PUE of the facility without replacing the entire equipment.
• Organizations with vacant space – EdgeCenter can be placed as modules in open spaces, eliminating the need to spend on the construction of a physical structure.
• An organization with little space – Containerized data center can be deployed in very little space, which can be outside to meet the data center requirements.