Edge virtual server infrastructure is a new market ripe for the picking, says Ian Raper, Riverbed Technology managing director, ANZ.

Eliminate expense of maintaining physical hardware Edge-VSI makes reading and writing to data stores thousands
of kilometres away as seamless as if they were local, eliminating the expense of maintaining physical hardware at the edge.

Edge-VSI decouples storage from the server, allowing virtualised servers, applications and data to be brought back to
the data centre and projected
back out to edge locations.

Local resources then take over, delivering local application performance despite the distances covered. It essentially brings organisations one step closer to a stateless.

The health and maturity of New Zealand’s virtualisation market has left some analysts questioning what
will be the next growth area.

According to IDC more than 40% of New Zealand organisations are already using some form of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with another 34.8% planning to adopt in the future.

While there’s still some life left in the market, we can expect opportunities for channel sales to slow as the market nears saturation.

The good news is there’s a new market about to open up, and the smart players are already jostling for starting positions.

Edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI), while similar to VDI, is designed to centralise and consolidate servers and storage from edge locations to the data centre, projecting
user resources to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local.

Let’s face it; despite the huge success and obvious benefits of virtualisation coupled with wide area network (WAN) optimisation technology, most organisations still invest in remote branches and their associated infrastructure.

At the edge

While most businesses would like to centralise their IT infrastructure into as few data centres or operational offices as possible, the reality is that with exponentially growing volumes of data, and the demands of custom and write-intensive applications, the need to work with large data sets has required computing and storage resources to be maintained at the edge.

Moving infrastructure closer to users clears the hurdles of availability and performance, but managing infrastructure at the edge comes at
a cost: increased IT support, and
risk to corporate data stored
outside the ‘four walls’.

Your customers are then
left with the additional
headaches of
increasing security
and performance
enhancements
to ensure optimal
productivity for
remote staff.

Since remote
offices often
have to rely on
local applications,
complete consolidation
to the data centre is
unlikely. And therein lies the
rub – or opportunity – for the next growth spurt.

Eliminate expense of maintaining physical hardware Edge-VSI makes reading and writing to data stores thousands
of kilometres away as seamless as if they were local, eliminating the expense of maintaining physical hardware at the edge.

Edge-VSI decouples storage from the server, allowing virtualised servers, applications and data to be brought back to
the data centre and projected
back out to edge locations.

Local reso