We have seen the tremendous potential for innovation, cost
saving, and flexibility being unleashed by the public clouds. The hyperscale data centers of the top three
public cloud providers are marvels to behold. Private cloud data centers and
hybrid cloud architectures are also on the rise as Fortune 500 companies shift
their IT spending to take advantage of this trend.
We are also now witnessing the long-predicted rise in the
Internet of Things. IDC’s recent Worldwide Semiannual Internet of
Things Spending Guide predicts spending on IoT will reach
$800 billion this year, up 16.7% year over year, and rising to nearly $1.4
trillion in 2021. IDC breaks down 2017
investments in IoT as follows: manufacturing operations ($105 billion), freight
monitoring ($50 billion), and production asset management ($45 billion), smart
grid technologies for electricity, gas and water and smart building
technologies ($56 billion and $40 billion, respectively). Looking to 2021, IDC
expects these use cases will remain the largest areas of IoT spending. The use
cases that will see the fastest spending growth are airport facilities
automation (33.4% CAGR), electric vehicle charging (21.1% CAGR), and in-store
contextual marketing (20.2% CAGR).
The Need for Edge Computing
At the intersection of these two trends is a new opportunity
that is just beginning to catch the interest of Silicon Valley – edge
computing, sometimes also called fog computing. The primary idea here is that
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications will benefit from both cloud
infrastructure and local compute/storage resources. Centralized controllers in
the cloud could be used for provisioning, performance monitoring, billing, and
big data analytics. Real-time control of the application and its associated
physical devices would be retained by an “edge” processing/storage unit.
This will drive the development of small server farms, or
“cloudlets”, located in-building, on-campus, or in a metro area data
center. Google recently disclosed plans
for more data centers in city centers rather than solely hyperscale campuses in
remote locations. AWS is promoting its “Greengrass” project, software for
running local compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities for connected
device. Greengrass runs locally and the AWS cloud provides management,
analytics, and durable storage.
The communication service providers have their own variation
for this general concept – Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center
(CORD). Under the Linux Foundation, CORD
is now an independent open source project aimed at leveraging the elasticity of
commodity clouds and merchant silicon for a new generation of smaller and more
efficient central offices. Backers include Google, Radisys, Samsung
Electronics, AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom,
and Verizon, vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, etc.
The Vitalpointz Application Forking Engine
Vitalpointz (vitalpointz.net)
is a Silicon Valley-based start-up with R&D operations in Bangalore, that
has just announced its entrance into this market. The company is led by veteran
successful entrepreneur Ravi Medikonda, who previously headed Vistapointe, a
start-up that specialized in cloud-based and real-time network monitoring
solutions for mobile operators. Vistapointe developed data extraction, analysis
and insight generation technologies that enabled mobile operators to gain
visibility into their mobile networks. The solution leveraged Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV) architecture, enabling it to run in a telco cloud. Brocade acquired Vistapointe in 2014. The
Vistapointe team went on to become Brocade’s Network Visibility and Analytics
business unit, establishing accounts with major North American and Japanese
mobile operators. With Broadcom’s $5.9
billion acquisition of Brocade and subsequent divestitures of many business
units, the time seemed right to pursue the new edge opportunity.
“We see a distinct opportunity for a better edge computing
paradigm,” says Vitalpointz’ Ravi Medikonda. “Application developers really
should not have to know specifically what hardware resources are available
locally versus in the cloud. Our forking
engine will automatically direct traffic to where it can be best processed. In
many cases, that might be a nearby CORD or on-prem server, but it might be the
public or private cloud.”
Applications are driven by multiple functional modules, also
known as micro-services, which can exist in different locations (VMs,
container, across racks, across data centers, etc.). We also know that
application deployment has changed to a SAAS multi-tenant model. The same deployment of “Office 365”
can serve multiple companies and customers.
So, the ability to specifically manage an application by host or an
IP-address is not possible.
The patent pending Vitalpointz Application Fork Engine
(VAFE) technology will enable applications to run “as is” across the cloud and
cloudlet without any configuration change. The company says its VAFE technology
will benefit several use cases that require quick responsiveness, low latency
and near real-time operation. VAFE can be embedded in x.86 platforms, VMs,
processor boards in Layer-2 DC switches or IIOT gateways.
Examples could include context-aware services and
location-aware services, asset tracking, video surveillance, connected cars,
augmented and virtual reality, etc.
Think of a hotel that is installing NFC-enabled door locks on its
customer rooms. When a new reservation
is booked online, a room suite is automatically assigned and a unique room
access code is generated and emailed to the guest. This part of the booking is
handled by the hotel management application in the cloud. When the guest
arrives at the hotel on the day of the booking, he or she may proceed directly
to the reserved room, which opens when their NFC-enabled phone is touched to
the door lock. The authenticated door opening transaction is processed locally
rather than in the cloud data center which could be thousands of miles away.
The Vitalpointz founding team has played the Silicon Valley
& Bangalore start-up game before with a successful outcome. A promising
market opportunity has been identified and key intellectual property is under
development. As is often the case, it is the focused engineering teams who have
worked together in the past that gain a first-to-market advantage over the
large vendors.
