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Home > What To Look for in Modern Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Five Ways to Ensure Your Edge Infrastructure Checks Every Box

Computing at the edge has become essential to improving the digital experience for both customers and employees. The latency and performance impact of traversing potentially thousands of miles to and from a data center is no longer acceptable.

Investment in edge infrastructure, including hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), is growing: IDC expects spending on edge infrastructure to top $250 billion in 2024.1 HCI is often the best choice and its ability to simplify operations, provide cloud-scale flexibility for the future, and advanced data management features boosts performance, resiliency and protection.

Best-in-Class Edge Infrastructure Must Meet Five Key Requirements
New technology initiatives that deliver on the most important demands of your business must have a wide array of capabilities. Focusing solely on any single attribute can lead to sub-optimal decisions. For this reason, those planning on deploying edge solutions should consider five key factors necessary for effective edge infrastructure:

  1. Cloud-like scalability: Future demands on edge infrastructure will continue to evolve, meaning it is essential to choose a solution that offers cloud-like scalability. Being able to go from a very small deployment to something much more substantial is mandatory. The ability to grow seamlessly, without needing to be on site, and to buy only what is needed at a specific point in time should be part of the solution.
  2. Cloud operations: IT must be able to fully operate and optimize edge infrastructure remotely, without compromise. The expertise of the IT team should be easily scaled to the edge, where the goal is to manage edge infrastructure from anywhere and reduce operational complexity by simplifying operations and ensuring consistency.
  3. Performance/efficiency: High-performance edge infrastructure is a must-have. Efficiency is traditionally measured by price/performance, software licensing costs, performance per watt, performance per rack unit and operational productivity. One way to improve cost efficiency is to reduce software license fees by using systems that have the optimal number of cores. Many software licenses are based on core count, so machines that have powerful CPUs such as AMD EPYC processors can help reduce spending. In addition, ensuring maximum operational productivity, where simple management and optimization of edge infrastructure enables predictive and secure experiences, is where HCI offers added value, since it tends to be easier to deploy and operate.
  4. Data integrity: Data will live at the edge, which requires infrastructure that protects the validity and accuracy of data and is designed for resiliency. HCI offers advantages, as organizations need solutions for smaller scale deployments that are simple, cost effective and provide recoverability without increasing resource use and costs. Partnerships with industry-leading data backup vendors are paramount.
  5. Security: Security at the edge is an especially important factor to consider to protect against cyber and physical theft. In addition to requiring traditional cyberdefenses, the edge has unique demands. For example, remote locations often have less physical security and increased risk of data theft, so end-to-end encryption should be built in from the ground up.

How Cisco and AMD Deliver Best-in-Class Edge Infrastructure
Cisco and AMD are partnering to deliver optimized solutions for edge infrastructure that meets all the capabilities noted above. Cisco’s HyperFlex Edge systems powered by AMD EPYC processors provide solutions as small as two nodes, with the ability to scale up to 64-node clusters. Additionally, unique one-socket systems are engineered to maximize performance and efficiency and lower software licensing costs without compromising functionality.

Using the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform, IT teams can manage and optimize all their edge locations using the same tool set they already use in their data center, reducing operational complexity and providing global management.

Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems deliver unique, flexible data integrity and resiliency capabilities that are both simple and cost effective, eliminating the need for additional edge infrastructure or connectivity to ensure resiliency and stability. Partnerships with leading data backup vendors enable you to quickly protect and recover data across your edge environments.

Organizations today understand the need for edge locations to have data encryption capabilities that protect sensitive information. Cisco HyperFlex offers a range of encryption options, such as self-encrypting drives and software-based encryption. Innovations within AMD EPYC processors secure virtualized environments, helping protect against a malicious hypervisor.

Cisco HyperFlex with AMD EPYC processors is aligned to meet the needs of today’s edge infrastructure, enabling organizations to deliver better end-user experiences by simplifying infrastructure and operations for your IT teams. For more information, please go to: www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/computing/ucs-amd.html.

1Worldwide Spending on Edge Computing Will Reach $250 Billion in 2024, According to a New IDC Spending Guide,” IDC, Sept. 23, 2020

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