From the hard drives of 30 years ago, technology has grown at such a rapid rate that any cellphone today has a bigger process capacity that any personal computer in the past.
By George Senzere, pre-sales manager: anglophone ITD global at Schneider Electric South Africa
The Internet of Things (IoT) poses a similar challenge, as networks of intelligent and connected devices, monitoring all types of systems, generating terabytes of data, needing storage, are escalating rapidly.
Whether it will be the 50 billion connected objects in 2020, estimated by Cisco or the 26 billion that Gartner predicts, it is certain our buildings, factories, data centres, cities, even vineyards will be deploying more and more data intensive applications.
Currently, much of this data is stored off-site in large complexes in remote areas. These data centres contain Big Data but sometimes it is necessary or useful to have this data in the neighbourhood of the connected object to avoid excessive latency (an important factor for critical infrastructures) and to optimise resources. This data can be later uploaded to the cloud to be analysed and processed.
Applications, in which response times are critical, coupled with the need to adjust costs, are encouraging IoT systems to become closer to the user and the data source. This phenomenon is known as edge computing.
Connected data allow us to optimise the processes in our factories, improve our city traffic, increase our field’s productivity, reduce electricity consumption and, in many cases, like in machine and data centres maintenance, anticipate possible failures. Data that is able to predict the future and improve people’s quality of life.
Vineyard example
In a vineyard, grapes have a complex process of growth if you truly want a wine with character. In the past, growers estimated the fallen rain, the hours of sun the strains had received, the temperature … and looking at the strains and grapes they could estimate the amount of water and fertiliser to use. Today, they can install sensors and programs that help them take the decision. They can also decide how much data they need to keep for the future, how often they need data to be taken, and in some cases, they will choose to have everything, hour by hour, in others, a fortnightly summary may be sufficient.
The IT Infrastructure is evolving alongside to these new profitability, flexibility and speed needs, demanded by the 4th Industrial Revolution. In vineyards, we are betting on the installation of data centres directly in a prefabricated container a modular solution that covers all the data processing needs in a few hours.
Industry needs on-site connectivity
If we focus on industry cases, connectivity between IT and OT is critical to ensure future competitiveness due to the increasing pressure on flexibility, productivity and cost reduction. This convergence requires bringing the data process as close as possible to the point where data is generated and consumed, especially in highly flexible, competitive environments in which smart information management is critical.
In the case of factories, in addition to the large data centres they may have at a global level, the tendency is to provide the plants with their own small processing centres that can control the critical information locally and, at the same time transfer information to your corporate cloud for more advanced analytical projections.
Aiding AI
In some countries, residential buildings already have some small data centres that process the information of different intelligent devices, such as the elevator, heating system, video cameras that allow their residents to enjoy a safer, more comfortable, and sustainable home.
It is possible to imagine that in the near future; our industries and data centres’ systems and machines will be able to learn from their environment and take decisions that will improve their functioning and that artificial intelligence (AI) will end up being more regular. This leap will have been driven by edge computing and decentralised IT infrastructure.