11 March 2022
The power, cooling, and enclosure equipment, as well as the compute it supports, provides the foundation on which applications can run and enables countless edge use cases.
Making the right physical infrastructure choice is even more important at the edge given that many deployments are in locations where additional support and protection is required. Navigating edge infrastructure is also made more complicated with the broad and varied definitions of edge. These factors make it challenging for the 49% of enterprises exploring edge computing deployments. They must make decisions on how best to use existing infrastructure and where to make investments today to support the needs of tomorrow.
Building on Vertiv’s work on the Edge Archetypes, which provided a taxonomy for categorizing edge use cases, this report takes those archetypes a step further to define four distinct edge infrastructure models. The framework was developed based on interviews with a range of industry practitioners, data centre experts, solution providers, and industry bodies across smart city, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail applications.
