The importance of any edge decision starts and ends with data. Using the industry’s build on the historical “V’s” of data (velocity, volume and variety), we highlight the edge’s importance: The velocity, volume and variety of data requires validity to value within a volatility window. In other words, the speed at which extreme amounts of disparate data is generated at the edge requires focused analysis to determine what aspect of the data is important before the worth of the data has expired. So, the edge is really a data management problem – understanding what to store or throw away, what to analyze, what to transport and how to secure it.

These decisions require a company to weigh the cost of edge compute versus the cost of data transport. Cost can come in different forms; dollars are an obvious cost, but time is another cost factor — and attempting to transport large amounts data for analysis on a time-critical function is not realistic and requires more localized compute capabilities. Thus, the need to optimize server selection based on your edge use case.

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Originally posted by:

Stephen Rousset and James Singer

Dell Technologies

March 2nd, 2020