Over the last several years, “edge computing” has become one of the most talked about trends in IT, and for good
reason. Grand Valley Research projects a CAGR of 41 percent for edge computing between 2018 and 2025. Nearly every industry is recognizing the limitations of supporting users and emerging technologies through centralized IT infrastructures and is pushiing storage and
computing closer to users and devices
Vertiv edge experts, in conjunction with an independent third party consulting firm, analyzed the use cases that comprise the edge ecosystem to develop a better
understanding of these differences and their implications for the supporting infrastructure. As a result of this analysis, we have identified four main archetypes for edge applications:
- Data Intensive
- Human-Latency Sensitive
- Machine-to-Machine-Latency Sensitive
- Life Critical
This paper presents a description of each archetype with examples of the most impactful use cases, along with an overview of their connectivity requirements to local, metro and regional hubs, which represent the edge transmission layer and core and are sometimes differentiated as edge, fog and cloud computing.