by James E. Carroll
Vapor IO has teamed up with Cellnex Telecom to extend its Kinetic Grid network for delivering edge and grid services to Europe.
Cellnex is making available a portfolio of small edge data centers and tower ground space for hosting the necessary equipment for edge computing. In addition, several fiber routes, provided by Cellnex and/or Cellnex´s mobile network operator customers, will interconnect these edge data centers creating a “grid” of edge nodes.
Vapor IO’s global Kinetic Grid platform delivers next generation internet and communications capabilities to metropolitan regions by bringing networking and automation software that enables micro modular data centers, software defined networks and hyperscale backbones to operate autonomously in highly-distributed edge locations, such as cell tower sites and edge data centers.
The first joint deployment for Vapor IO and Cellnex will be in Barcelona and will add to the 36 cities already served by Vapor IO in the United States. This edge grid is expected to expand over the next couple of years throughout Europe thanks to the vast infrastructure for digital services that Cellnex currently operates.
Eduardo Fichmann, Global Director of Innovation and Product Strategy at Cellnex, said: “Cellnex is delighted to enable Vapor IO’s neutral host Kinetic Grid to Europe, starting in Barcelona. We invite our anchor tenants and global telecom service providers to leverage this partnership to virtualize the computing infrastructure in such a way that it will allow the federation and optimization of the use of computing resources and of the network itself by third-party applications on a neutral host model.”
Cole Crawford, Vapor IO´s Founder and CEO, noted: “Vapor IO and Cellnex share a common commitment to neutral host infrastructure. Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid is both cloud-neutral and carrier-neutral, meaning it is one of the few locations at the edge where both carriers and clouds can meet on equal terms. We invite cloud and technology providers to leverage our edge and grid computing infrastructure to deploy new classes of high-performance applications that cannot be serviced by today’s cloud infrastructure.”
