The migration to the edge is changing how today's industry leaders think about data centers, as they grapple with a broad data center ecosystem comprised of many types of facilities and increasingly rely on the edge. Of the participants who currently have edge locations or expect to have them by 2025, more than half (53%) expect the number of edge locations they support to increase by at least 100%, with 20% expecting growth of 400% or more. Overall, study participants expect the total number of edge computing locations to increase by 226% between now and 2025.
During the original study conducted in 2014, Edge computing was recognized as a growing trend, although it only received four mentions in the 19-page report. The industry's focus at that time was firmly on leveraging colocation, cloud, and enterprise resources within hybrid architectures. Even in an industry that typically moves and changes at lightning speed, the growth of Edge computing and its enormous impact on data centers is astonishing.
“In just five years, we’ve seen the birth of an entirely new segment of the ecosystem driven by the need to place computing closer to the user,” said Rob Johnson, CEO of Vertiv. “This new distributed network is built on mission-critical edge solutions that have fundamentally changed how we think about the data center.”.
“It’s quite a challenge to make predictions about technological changes beyond two or three years, but this study aligns with the idea of a constantly evolving and incredibly dynamic market unfolding before our eyes,” said Giordano Albertazzi, President of Vertiv in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “Specifically, the future growth of edge computing is consistent with the projected increase in AI, IoT, and other latency- and bandwidth-intensive applications. The challenge—given the data center staffing shortage—will be managing all this new infrastructure effectively and efficiently. Remote management and strategies like lights-out data centers—located off-site within a company's facilities—will play an increasingly important role.”
Among the conclusions drawn, we can highlight:
- Participants have expressed less optimism about the possibility of using solar and wind energy in data centers compared to 2014. At that time, they estimated that 34% of a data center's energy needs could be met by these sources by 2025. Currently, those estimates have decreased to 21% – and are still optimistic, given the ambitious timeline.
- Globally, 16% of participants expect to be retired by 2025, which could exacerbate the current talent shortage. In the US, this figure could rise to an alarming 33%.
