As edge computing takes off, DCD’s event in Sydney will show that Australia has the power to keep up.
Everyone agrees that the edge is where it’s going to happen. All the major shifts, from smart cities, to autonomous vehicles to the Internet of Everything, depend on fast networks tied closely to real-time sensors, intelligent devices and greedy end users. This is forcing us to change how we build our information networks.
Planning for what is defined can be complex, planning for what is not defined or half-defined, much more so. Therefore a half-day seminar – Edge in an era of Digital Transformation – will held on the morning of Thursday August 23 before the start of DCD>Australia at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, to share practical insights, experiences, case studies and analyses of decision-making as well as recommendations as to best practice. DCD spoke to four of the experts who will contribute their experience and insight to the Focus Seminar which will include four keynote presentations, two discussion panels, round tables, and networking.The roll-out of edge has an inevitability to it and a majority of Australian companies say that it is already impacting their IT delivery architectures, according to DCD’s APAC Attitudes research, January 2018. Yet strategies preparing for edge are more limited and actual edge compute instances rarer still. This suggests a degree of shadow boxing, that the edge is already being built while we are still defining it, and planning how to use it.
“Dave Sterlace, ABB”
Global head of technologies for data center industry sector, ABB
- Edge Seminar Panel: What are the unique design considerations of the Edge data center in terms of its usage requirements and location?
As global head of technologies for the data center industry sector, Dave is responsible for matching the myriad of products and systems that ABB designs and manufactures to the needs of particular industry sectors. Increasingly, his conversations with clients have dealt with digitalization and, among other initiatives, ABB has partnered with HPE and Rittal to deliver Industry IoT to bring automation and integrated communications to the factory floor.
His experience of IoT is based also on ABB’s own production and monitoring processes. An internal review suggests that there are around 70 million ABB devices around the world and these are being digitalised under the same banner and this initiative gives ABB a very good first-hand view of the Edge. In this process and from a working definition of Edge as “where your stuff meets the Internet”, Dave sees cybersecurity as a key challenge, along with the new urgency of being able to make infrastructure and power delivery scalable to demand.
Dave’s role allows him also to draw comparisons between different industries in their progress towards Edge based around “what is vital to your industry”. He sees also that power generation will become more disaggregated and localised and cites the example of Google buying into a utility which will allow them he hypothesize, to connect their local datacentre at utility company voltages using a purpose-built substation.
In terms of his contribution to the DCD>Australia Edge seminar, Dave is aware of the considerable data center activity in Australia and he looks forward to seeing how the sector in Australia has evolved in terms of optimisation. He points out the experience that the Australia resources sector already has in remote compute – “we can take learnings from oil and gas and how they would deploy a DC in a box. It is not scary as it has already been done”…Click here to read full article.
