In this era of digital transformation, as we witness the runaway growth of edge computing, the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is doing its part to help organizations achieve scalability, redundancy, and resiliency goals. With traditional UPSs, if you need to expand, you typically must purchase another unit that will sit next to the existing UPS or replace it with more capacity. Some organizations anticipate this by overprovisioning. They might deploy a 10kVA unit even though their current needs call for only 5kVA. In some cases, the added capacity never gets used. However, businesses can g ..read more

Digital transformation is driving unprecedented challenges when it comes to planning, installing, and operating IT systems. The traditional scope of IT management has quickly expanded into a hybrid world where management of cloud and colocation relationships, along with edge computing sites, have added to IT staff workloads. In addition, at a time when organizations are trying to streamline their IT support costs, the demand for technical IT skills is increasing. Issues of resource shortages are particularly acute in regional and local edge computing locations. Yet, this market challenge ..read more

For retailers to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace, the ability to “go digital” is emerging as a critical success factor. Remaining competitive and maintaining market leadership now depends heavily on a retailer’s ability to generate a unique but streamlined, digitally-driven customer experience. As the influence of digitization continues to expand, retailers are leveraging technology tools like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, expanded mobile payment platforms, RFID, and digital signage  ̶  all supported through edge computing systems &nb ..read more

As IT infrastructure evolves, operators find themselves supporting a broad mix of cloud, colocation, on-premise, and regional and local edge data centers. For the IT staff that manages these diverse environments, streamlining and simplifying the ongoing technology acquisition, delivery, and support processes is a constant challenge. This is particularly true of edge computing environments, where the exponential growth of data drives the need for much more robust support across hundreds and sometimes thousands of micro data center edge sites. According to a recent IDC survey[1 ..read more

The global edge computing market size will exceed $68 billion USD by 2028, according to Grand View Research. That number represents a 38% compound annual growth rate from 2021. Although edge computing sites are much smaller than traditional data centers, the criticality of many of these remote sites remains quite high. For example, consider retail stores that must keep Point of Sale (POS) systems online or warehouses that need edge systems supporting physical infrastructure ― such as rack PDUs (power distribution units) ― to secure uptime and keep the supply chain moving. So much key data is c ..read more

Hurricanes, blizzards, wildfires, and other weather events in recent years have grown in magnitude and intensity. One of the habitual casualties of this trend is the power supply – the bigger the storm, the more likely it is to cause blackouts. This situation poses a challenge for hybrid IT infrastructure management, particularly at edge computing sites that run hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. With HCI, even a short power outage can create big problems because shutdown and restarting procedures must follow specific steps to avoid data corruption or loss. Micro data centers that ..read more

IT solution providers spend much of their time focused on the day-to-day needs of customers. Yet, to thrive in this business, providers must keep an eye on the future by ensuring their business model can anticipate customer needs. This means taking the time to periodically reevaluate skills and competencies and how they map to customer needs. In addition, as technology evolves, providers sometimes have to step out of their comfort zone by adding competencies to help their customers leverage new services and solutions. IT solution providers that don’t evolve are missing out on additional revenu ..read more

Digital transformation is rapidly accelerating the growth of computing at the edge. Spending on global edge computing is expected to reach $176 billion in 2022[1], increasing 14.8% over 2021, and projected to hit $274 billion in 2025.[2] As organizations look to enable their digital-first journeys at edge sites, one critical element to success is uptime. IDC recently conducted a survey[3] in which respondents highlight that resilient power is mission-critical in edge computing sites. However, finding space in a rack to add power protection can become an issue, especially in small IT closets th ..read more

As pandemic-related concerns persist, colleges and universities are walking a fine line between on-campus and remote learning while struggling with IT staff shortages. These challenges open up opportunities for IT solution providers to deliver managed power services to monitor and service campus IT infrastructure and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). Delivering a hybrid learning approach that combines remote and on-campus classes strains IT departments. In many cases, they’re already stretched thin. To compound the issue, IT workers are in short supply, so recruitment is a challenge. In a ..read more

Many organizations and industries are harnessing the power of data and digital tools with edge computing to improve resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, and safety and security. The attraction of edge computing is immediately apparent. Sending all that device-generated data to a centralized data center or the cloud causes bandwidth and latency issues. Edge computing offers a more efficient alternative: data is processed and analyzed closer to the point where it is created. Edge computing’s growing role in digitization Edge computing is defined as a distributed computing framework that ..read more