Eagle-Lanner tech blog

 

5G is anticipated to greatly benefit IIoT (industrial IoT) with optimized performance, ultra-low latency, and wider network coverage and bandwidth. Among the technological advancements of 5G, network slicing is one of the most expected game changer, enabling cellular operators to divide a physical network architecture into multiple “slices”, which functions as a virtual network, each serving a particular application, cluster or even an ecosystem. More importantly, each virtual network “slice” can be software-defined to meet specific requirements or service, so that QoS (quality of service) and performance are assured with comprehensive, multi-layered security.

Edge computing, or its enhanced version, MEC (multi-access edge computing), has become a proven concept for the foundation of 5G network infrastructure. With the increasing deployments of MEC for the future 5G, the demands for micro data center have skyrocketed, from a US$1.7 billion market in 2015 to become a tremendous US$6.3 billion market by 2020, according to forecasts by MarketsandMarkets.

Since the introduction of cloud computing, IT infrastructures have become the facilitating core of enterprise competitiveness to gain larger market shares of mobile users. In fact, IT services are also critical for the internal efficiency and productiveness, particularly for the corporations with branches worldwide. That’s the reason why SD-WAN has been the buzzword in the IT sector as it promises the liberation of vendor lock-in hardware and software. Thus, it is considerably fair to say that SD-WAN has revolutionized WAN infrastructure.

The 5G roll-out competitions among global leaders in telecommunication have driven technological innovations in the wireless connectivity, as there have been partnerships formed between major telecom service providers and leading SD-WAN vendors, for example, Verizon and Cisco. On the other hand, SD-WAN has already been adopted as the complementing technology to existing 4G LTE links to deliver mobile business applications in satisfying performance.

The promising future of 5G has driven countries in the world into a technological competition, as major CSP (communication service providers) conglomerates worldwide are competing to get ahead in the 5G deployments. Thanks to the global sports events in recent years, for instance, the World Cup 2018, the public had the opportunity to experience and witness the 5G demonstrations and it appears that the success of such technology lies in the edge, rather than the cloud.

SD-WAN has continued its momentum in the technological segment due to its shortened deployment time and cost-saving advantages. In fact, SD-WAN helps IT management simplify their existing hybrid WAN infrastructure by abstracting a software layer over the networking hardware for management and control.

Since 2016, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has been one of the fastest-growing technologies, from a US$ 2 billion market to US$ 5 billion in 2019 according to research by Gartner. It is anticipated that majority of data centers worldwide will adopt HCI by 2020. With HCI hypervisor, IT management can integrate and virtualize networking, computing and storage into one single infrastructure to simplify today’s data center orchestration and improve flexibility. Under HCI infrastructure, a white-box server is “converged” with multiple virtual machines which share the same hardware resources, like CPU, DRAM and SSD, to execute networking, computing and storage. In this case, orchestration and storage are software-defined and virtualized on a open hardware platform.

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