Antoine Harb, Team Leader Middle East at Kingston Technology speaks with DC Post MEA and highlights the contribution of IoT and digital transformation driving significant growth that edge computing is experiencing and explains the impact of edge computing and 5G on data centers
Antoine Harb, Team Leader Middle East at Kingston Technology
What are the latest trends influencing edge computing?
When we speak about the latest trends and how edge computing is evolving, we always expect to hear about exciting new things – something we have never heard of before. The reality looks different. While edge computing may not turn out the newest trends, it most likely enables them.
The key markets for edge computing continue to grow is the one for 5G deployment and IoT integration, which itself turns out a great number of innovations in the automotive, manufacturing, healthcare and many other industries. In fact, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices worldwide is forecast to almost triple from 9.7 billion in 2020 to more than 29 billion IoT devices in 2030 and the global edge computing market is also expected to grow significantly in the coming years, with some experts estimating that the market will reach $155.9 Billion by 2030.
What is the relationship between 5G and edge computing?
5G is the fifth-generation of the technology standard for broadband cellular networks, which telecommunication companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, and will enable up to 100 times faster data transfers than 4G. Therefore, 5G is creating never-before-seen opportunities for people and businesses, such as low latency coverage for big data streams that power applications like IoT devices, semi-autonomous vehicles, and augmented reality.
In order to deliver these great new broadband speeds however, the 5G network comes with particular infrastructure requirements. The main hardware components for the 5G technology implementation are the usage of 5G small cell infrastructure and RAN towers. Since 5G radio waves have proven incapable to penetrate walls, it is important to use small cell base stations, which are designed to blend into the landscape by taking up a minimal amount of space, while being distributed in clusters in highly populated areas to provide continuous connection and complement the macro network that provides wide-area coverage. In short, 5G will rely upon a dense network of small cells to provide continuous highspeed broadband.
The now faster created data will still need processing and was traditionally sent back to huge sever farms also known as the Cloud. However, this is where edge computing comes in. As in a nutshell, Edge computing enables data to be processed at its source instead of being sent to a centralised data center, resulting in the reduction of latency and increasing the speed of data processing.
How 5G and edge computing will impact the future of data centers?
As mentioned above, both the IoT and Edge computing market are still very much expanding and with them the deployment of data centers. Data centers, IoT and Edge computing can be seen as a symbiose to enable digital transformation. In the light of 5G and edge computing as a whole, data centers are the base for both technologies to thrive.
As data centers continue to evolve and the requirement for data center hardware grows, it is key to understand current and future needs. Choosing the best technology partner will ensure that growth is in the right direction. With over 35 years of industry experience, Kingston Technology has developed its award-winning post- and pre-sales service, Ask-An-Expert to help businesses to find the right storage and memory solutions to support them now and in the future.
What role does your company play in edge data centers?
Kingston’s leading Enterprise SATA 3.0 and NVMe Data Center (DC) SSDs are high-performance, low-latency, and designed to handle today’s extensive workloads such as AI, machine learning, data analysis, cloud computing, operational databases (ODB), database applications and data storage. Performance, security, and reliability are crucial to securing a company’s critical data storage.
At Kingston Technology, millions are invested in the development and testing of its modules today, to reduce the total cost of ownership tomorrow. The resulting performance, stability and long-term reliability are among the reasons Kingston server memory has become a worldwide industry standard. Upgrading server memory can accelerate larger databases, provide faster responses for those using the cloud and improve speed for applications living in memory.
Kingston’s proven experience, recognised best practices and being a trusted industry leader make our products a smart choice, with features that keep mission-critical data centers running around the clock.
How do you see the edge market developing over the next few years globally and locally in the Middle East?
In an article published by NES Fircroft it is stated that the Egyptian government dedicated 12.7 billion Egyptian pounds during the 2020 to 2021 fiscal year to support the digital transformation and also launched a “Digital Egypt” project2.
Other countries in the Middle East have also worked hard to build and expand existing internet infrastructure to develop an infrastructure that will enable a faster adoption of the digital transformation.
In addition, the UAE also announced an economic revival project focused on long-term investment in the digital economy through the development of advanced technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence post-pandemic.
Lastly, Dubai has become the world’s first paperless government, meaning that all 45 government entities in the emirate are now paperless and provide more than 1,800 digital services covering 10,500 key transactions3. This strategy has helped to save more than Dhs1.3bn and over 14-million-man hours across the workforce of the Dubai government.
All the above are investments that have been made to support the digital transformation of the Middle East and are all reliant on a resilient infrastructure which will rely upon Edge computing and therefore data centers.
