Vapor IO has announced Vapor Kinetic Edge, a technical architecture for combining multiple Vapor Edge micro data centres into a virtual data centre that can span an entire city and deliver twelve or more nines of availability. Vapor IO has also announced the Vapor Edge Module (VEM), a self-contained, standalone micro modular data centre specifically designed to support edge co-location environments. These two advancements, combined with Vapor IO’s existing edge products, complete a “cloud down” approach for delivering cloud computing to the very edge of the last mile network.
“The edge is not a box. It’s a highly-interconnected suite of hardware, software and connectivity working together in concert,” said Cole Crawford, founder & CEO of Vapor IO. “Our Kinetic Edge architecture and the Vapor Edge Module deliver true edge cloud by being part of a complete portfolio of products, including our flagship Vapor Chamber, all of which work together to deliver on customer needs. It’s not enough to provide bent sheet metal. You need to tie all of the components together with thoughtful engineering and software so you can algorithmically and autonomically orchestrate the edge.”
Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge is a new kind of infrastructure architecture that uses software and high-speed connectivity to combine multiple micro data centre facilities into a single “logical data center.” For developers and operators, it presents a geographically-dispersed collection of micro data centres as a single virtual facility with multiple availability zones.
“We are deploying Kinetic Edge right now,” said Crawford. “We start by placing multiple Vapor edge data centres in a geographic region, spaced 15 to 20 Km apart. We then connect them with high speed fibre so that our software can stitch these sites together into a highly-reliable and customisable edge presence that can span an entire city or region.”
A Kinetic Edge consists of:
- Multiple Vapor Chambers or Vapor Edge Modules, spaced 10 Km to 20 Km apart
- High-speed site-to-site fiber connectivity with redundant paths
- Vapor Edge Controllers in each location that manage the fiber connectivity and present software APIs that expose edge conditions in real time
- Software for IP aggregation at the edge, as well as for site-to-site handoff of IP addresses to support devices in motion, as well as for migrating network traffic for load balancing and failover
- Ingestible telemetry for application and container orchestration integration
Traditional data centres are made more resilient by replicating critical systems at each site. For example, a 2N+1 site would require three of everything: generators, backup batteries, cabling, cooling systems, and so on. The company says that a Kinetic Edge installation with no redundancy at individual sites can seamlessly combine sites to exceed the availability of the most reliable Tier 4 data centres. Vapor IO claims that Kinetic Edge with five sites can offer twelve nines of availability (99.9999999999% uptime), without the costs of replicating critical infrastructure at each site. This level of reliability is achieved by distributing risk across all sites in the Kinetic Edge and using software to monitor environmental conditions and replicate workloads and data so that there is no single point of failure.
The Vapor Edge Module (VEM) is a completely self-contained, containerised edge data centre that is factory-assembled and delivered as a single unit. It is designed to enable weather-hardened, multi-tenant edge locations where the economics of shared infrastructure creates a long-term value proposition. Built around the highly efficient Vapor Chamber design, each VEM supports up to 150 Kw of IT load in a small, efficient footprint. The prefabricated design incorporates all of the critical data centre systems, including power distribution, cooling, fire suppression, security, and racking systems for IT equipment. Additionally, the VEM supports an adaptive ‘blindmate’ cooling plant that allows for chilled water, direct expansion, or adiabatic cooling depending on the given location and climate.
