US colocation provider Flexential is launching a local Edge program, using a partnership with cell tower operator American Tower.
Flexential's Local Edge, part of a group of services called FlexAnywhere, is a "remote data center," which provides colocation services, using hardware deployed close to end users and applications, thanks to the partnership with American Tower. At the moment, this means using Colo Atl, a data center in Atlanta, bought by American Tower in 2019, with plans to use two other data centers which American Tower is building at cell towers in Denver and Boulder, Colorado.
Breaking the fourth wall?
"This partnership pushes beyond the four walls of traditional data centers to connect businesses to their customers with the lowest latency, highest security and most comprehensive network services possible very near the end-user," promises the Flexential release, which says that Local Edge will put hardware and software close to the application, but in professionally designed, maintained and connected Edge data centers.
"By combining our strengths with these partners, we can leverage the FlexAnywhere network to offer our customers the means to drive edge computing even further than it has been – not just to the metro area but also to the street level," said Flexential Chief Executive Officer Chris Downie in the release.
"This is an exciting advancement lowering latency to our customers in various industries, including transportation, logistics, finance, gaming and healthcare, supporting a variety of IoT, video, AI, and other real-time dynamic applications. Local Edge will push to use 5G and AI in a more meaningful way for traffic controls, autonomous vehicles, infrastructure monitoring and more."
The FlexAnywhere fabric uses a scalable 100Gbps backbone with access to Flexential's national data centers, IP networking and connectivity to public clouds including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. Other details are scarce at present, but you can see a Flexential chief innovation officer Jason Carolan up a mountain in a video.
