Data center News

This Edge Solution Keeps The Water Running In Cape Cod

Stratus Technologies discusses the rising demand for its edge computing offerings as new research finds that the market could climb to $4 trillion by 2030.

When it comes to having running water, downtime isn’t an option. Control system failures at wastewater treatment facilities could lead to public health issues and large fines, which is why many organizations across the world are turning to the edge.

“They don’t have a person sitting there all the time,” said Jason Andersen, vice president of strategy and business line management at Maynard, Mass.-based Stratus Technologies, a producer of edge computing offerings. “So, as they are deploying more compute applications and more machine-learning applications, they don’t have someone to care and feed for it.”

Andersen said Stratus’ highly automated edge computing offerings have proven to be particularly valuable in remote environments. In Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod, where the population increases by nearly 100,000 people in the summer months, the offerings reportedly had 99.99 percent uptime, or less than 1 hour of unplanned downtime a year.

It’s the kind of impact that has many experts predicting a massive shift in computing, in which the edge takes center stage. A new report by telecom analyst Chetan Sharma predicts that the edge computing market will reach $4 trillion by 2030. He also said the edge will become the main source for artificial intelligence and analytics, tasks that are right now largely produced in the cloud.

Stratus is already seeing the demand. In 2018, Stratus unveiled its ztC Edge system as part of its push into industrial edge computing. One year later, Andersen said it’s taking off.

“Our business in the first quarter for ztC was double what it was the entire year for the previous year, and we are looking this quarter to double again,” he said. “We see it as being a much more critical part in being able to control devices, control robots and control vehicles and things in the future, so we think the need today will continue to keep growing,” said Andersen.

Stratus is working with its partners to meet that demand. In July, the edge computing company unveiled a new partner portal. For more information, check out CRN’s video included in this article.