Not long ago, data centers were the primary bastions for data, servers, networking, applications, and other infrastructure. Residing in these locations, or at least nearby, often was a highly skilled IT staff focused on designing, testing, and supporting all of that infrastructure. But the paradigm for the data center is changing fast. Enterprises are pushing computing to the outer edges of the network near or right at production sites where true production is happening, whether they are producing electricity, or using intelligent sensors to monitor factory automation systems.
Our customers are increasingly investing to protect business critical apps on the Edge
We’re seeing this transformation up close in a big way as we observe our customers increasingly deploy business critical applications beyond and geographically away from their data centers. With our heritage of helping customers to protect their applications with continuous availability, we have led the industry with fault-tolerant hardware and software for nearly four decades. Building on our success and leadership with protecting the data center’s most critical applications—from ATMs to airline reservations to manufacturing execution systems—we are bringing our trademark of innovative availability to edge computing with solutions that are hands down the easiest to deploy and operate, with the longest life span on the market. In fact, for the first time, Stratus generated more revenue from the edge than data centers in our last fiscal year.
IIoT and Smart Manufacturing are fueling the rise of the Edge
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a big driver behind edge computing. IIoT is starting to take shape as the next phase in the rapid expansion of industrial automation, which also happens to be one of our largest, most robust markets. Companies that are ready to modernize their infrastructures are attracted to IIoT because it offers substantial improvements in efficiency, productivity, and business intelligence. We’re seeing IIoT adoption across food and beverage, oil and gas, specialty chemicals, and water and waste management, among other industries. As evidence of this adoption, IndustryARC pegs the IIoT market as reaching $123 billion by 2021.
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The Edge poses unique functional requirements
Understandably, enterprises need to plan carefully when deploying systems at the edge given the requirements traditional data center solutions cannot meet. Edge systems are often in remote locations, such as a natural gas compression station or on a dairy production floor. At sites far away from corporate resources, the local, often tiny staff lacks IT skills, and yet they rely on multiple applications generating the most critical of data. On top of that, these systems are streaming this data to other core functions at various sites across the enterprise—on-premise and in a hybrid cloud. If these edge systems fail, they remove an IIoT link vital to the chain of enterprise data flow and slow or even halt production flow, create compliance issues, and impact customers.
Providing an Edge to our customers
That’s where Stratus comes in by protecting the integrity and availability of vital applications at the edge of your networks. With our concept of the Stratus Smart Connected Hub™, you get assurance of no unplanned downtime with fault tolerance and predictive system monitoring. We continue to offer the lowest TCO for critical edge applications because our systems offer hands-off operation, run on open, standard environments, and don’t require IT skills to operate.
Our strategy is to support more customers in their journey to the Edge
To stay ahead of the transformation underway with edge-centric computing, we will expand our focus on the growing number of use cases in this space. These include virtualization, analytics, predictive modeling, artificial intelligence, supply chain unification, and more. With our innovative, always-on systems designed for true IT simplicity, you will be able to “go over the edge” with confidence and capture valuable IIoT-driven gains in efficiency and productivity.
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