Edge Archetypes 2.0: Deployment-Ready Edge Infrastructure Models
Edge Archetypes 2.0 Deployment-Ready Edge Infrastructure Models
Architecting the Optimal Edge Computing Infrastructure for Your Business
The physical infrastructure is key in any edge computing strategy. The power, cooling, and enclosure equipment, as well as the compute it supports, provides the foundation on which applications can run and enables countless edge use cases.
Making the right physical infrastructure choice is even more important at the edge given that many deployments are in locations where additional support and protection is required. Navigating edge infrastructure is also made more complicated with the broad and varied definitions of edge. These factors make it challenging for the 49% of enterprises exploring edge computing deployments. They must make decisions on how best to use existing infrastructure and where to make investments today to support the needs of tomorrow.
Building on Vertiv’s work on the Edge Archetypes, which provided a taxonomy for categorizing edge use cases, this report takes those archetypes a step further to define four distinct edge infrastructure models. The framework was developed based on interviews with a range of industry practitioners, data center experts, solution providers, and industry bodies across smart city, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail applications
Benchmark Your Activity at the Network Edge
In a recent Vertiv survey, professionals from diverse industries report on their edge activity and the infrastructure archetypes they are using to address emerging edge computing use cases. Read more about the survey respondents’ growth at the edge, location and size of their edge computing assets, and the edge computing technologies being used to address top concerns such as sustainability.
Download the
Edge Archetypes 2.0 Report
As the edge matures and edge sites become more sophisticated, creating edge infrastructure models is a necessary step toward understanding site-specific equipment and design standardization that can increase efficiency, reduce costs and streamline deployment.
Over the past decade as the edge started to emerge as a critical part of the network and the larger data center ecosystem, the industry has struggled to consistently define or categorize edge deployments.
We took a first step toward categorization with the introduction of edge archetypes in 2018.
Grouping by use case was an important first step, but to fully understand the edge we had to dive into the details. There are many factors to consider when evaluating a potential edge deployment. We have identified the most significant of these and applied them alongside the original archetypes to help us better understand what physical form edge infrastructure is taking.
This paper advances the conversation from the broad categorizations of the archetypes to a more detailed and practical evaluation of edge use cases, industries, and external environments.
