Edge data centers need three things: Equipment housing, real estate and fiber

Vapor IO working with Crown Castle to deploy edge data centers

Large, centralized data centers house the racks, servers and other hardware needed to support cloud services, content delivery networks, customized enterprise workloads and other functionality. With the emergence of 5G and the latency reductions needed to support a range of applications like mobile gaming, industrial automation and autonomous driving, for instance, there’s a concurrent move to take that centralized compute power and distribute it to edge data centers.

Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer of Vapor IO, explained in an interview with RCR Wireless News, the requirements for deploying edge data centers. “If you think about what you need to build edge computing infrastructure, you need three things: A way to house the equipment and cool it. You need real estate and ideally real estate that’s colocated with the wireless network infrastructure…and the third thing you need is fiber” in order to interconnect to other sites, backhaul networks and peering sites. 

Vapor IO started out with a focus on improving data center equipment in regards to power consumption, cooling and other key cost variables, which resulted in its Vapor Chamber, a cylindrical rather than rectangular IT rack, and the Vapor Edge Module, essentially modular edge data centers designed for multiple tenants and capable of enabling 150 kW of IT loads on six racks. The company says the edge data centers can be deployed in less than a day.

Tech in hand, Trifiro explained that in June 2017 Vapor partnered with neutral host wireless infrastructure and fiber provider Crown Castle to form Project Volutus, which is described as “colocation and data center as a platform service” by the company. “It’s completely neutral,” Trifiro said. “Anybody that wants to put IT equipment in thousands of edge locations that are colocated with wireless infrastructure can become a customer of Volutus. It’s essentially your standard colocation business but reinvented for these geographically dispersed edge environments. That business is so exciting and robust and in high demand that that has essentially become our focus.”

In terms of deploying edge data centers, Trifiro said the first equipment was installed in Chicago, Ill. “Our vision is in every major metropolitan area…to build five to seven sites.” Placed, like fiber, in a metro ring configuration with spacing around 10 kilometers to 15 kilometers, you see latency between five milliseconds to 10 milliseconds, “which is the sweet spot for these edge infrastructure applications.”

Editor’s note: No need to go looking for your copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology like I did. Volutus is a type of cloud characterized by “a long, typically low, horizontal, detached, tube-shaped cloud mass, often appearing to roll slowly about a horizontal axis,” according to the World Meteorological Organization’s International Cloud Atlas. Get it?