Dell has just released a mobile edge computing (MEC) product with AT&T and VMware, aimed at making the edge “real and actionable” in the manufacturing sector and beyond.
“The system is a combination of components from Dell and AT&T,” Doug Lieberman, senior director of global solutions and co-creation services at Dell’s telecom systems business told Silverlinings on a call. “The two pieces together, it’s built on top of our Apex cloud service...which gives an as -a-service ready-to-go cloud in a box offering...Layered on top of that is the AT&T MEC portion of it, which is driving the routing and the [user plane] functions to ensure you are at the edge.”
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The kinds of customers that will use this type of architecture have a lot of devices that are generating a large amount of traffic at the edge, that will need local processing, while still interacting with a larger outside cloud or multi-cloud.
Liberman said that examples of that included manufacturing companies that use a lot of autonomous vehicles inside of factories (pickers, robots, etc.), automation, and companies that use video surveillance. “An example I like to use is video surveillance,” Liberman said.
When there is a theft or someone gets hurt, a company wants instantaneous results on that. This requires a large amount of instantaneous local data processing, Liberman noted. At the same time, there’s also a set of that traffic -- or small snippets of it -- that needs to be fed up into the cloud that the company can run analytics on to find out details about how much inventory they would need at a particular time, or other such information.
“Another place that we’re seeing a lot is areas where there’s tons and tons of sensors, things like ride controls for amusement parks, because there’s just thousands of sensors,” Liberman explained.
These sensors detect measurements like where the vehicles are, the acceleration, braking and speed of the rides, when people get on and off the cars, the wind shear and many other factors, he added.
Liberman admitted that the MEC system could be connected via 5G, 4G or even a wired connection. “Where it really shines and why we developed this to really exploit the benefits of 5G...and to build a MEC solution that is truly tailorable to that,” the Dell dude said.
Ericsson adds Dell PowerEdge servers to its Cloud RAN offering
Separately, Ericsson said that it is adding Dell PowerEdge servers to its Cloud RAN system. The telecom vendor said that the performance, form factor and resilience offered by the servers brings more choice for Cloud RAN customers. "The Ericsson and Dell collaboration will further enable open cloud networks that allow customers to choose their own infrastructure while ensuring telco-grade performance at the far edge," the vendor added in a statement.
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