Speed matters!
The distance is just a few metres and the ball is travelling at over 100 km/h. Who reacts first? When faced with a penalty, the goalkeeper only has a chance if he senses where his opponent is aiming – and if he reacts at lightning speed, with seamless coordination of eyes, hands and feet.
It’s a matter of milliseconds and perfect, lightning-fast movements, as there can only be one victor in this duel.
Latency is the period between an event occurring and the start of a visible reaction to it. In IT – as in many sports – latency is a key success factor. One example involves VR worlds – the shorter the delay, the more realistic the experience in a virtual setting. Or take driverless vehicles – the information that a vehicle ahead is braking needs to be captured, processed and shared with the connected systems at lightning speed.
With Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, an increasing number of machines are equipped with sensors that provide a vast volume of data. This data needs to be captured, processed, evaluated and stored quickly and locally, as proximity is a crucial factor for ensuring short latency and rapid reactions. Sending data across very long distances to central data centers in the cloud, which then send back a response, takes up a great deal of time – often too much.
Global data volumes are forecast to increase tenfold to over 163 zettabytes by 2025 compared to 2016. Edge computing can move the processing of these data volumes to the edge of the cloud. This ensures the availability of data in real time and is a prerequisite for digitising critical processes. An edge data centre is built where data is found – for example, directly at a production plant. Such a system needs to be easy to install, use and administer. High levels of availability and protection against system failure and data loss also need to be ensured.
The Rittal Edge Data Center is a platform for quickly developing an IT environment that can be used flexibly in any other IT environment. This platform consists of Rittal TS IT racks and modules for cooling, power distribution, UPS, early fire detection, monitoring and secure access. The modules are available in various output classes and can be scaled into a solution that can be implemented quickly.