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What is a Regional Edge Data Centre?

And what are the benefits to your business?

The Edge is the furthest extent of your network. For an international bank this could be their office in Sydney, for a mining company this could be the autonomous truck in a mine in Far North Queensland and for a NSW government department it could be their office in Tamworth.

Edge is more about use case than location. There are three primary edge use cases:

Customer Premises

If you have, or are running critical or legacy applications that require low-millisecond latency (think robotics, medical imaging or factory automation) we call this space the Customer Premises Edge. This could be just a half rack in the corner of the office, or a purpose-built on-premises containerised Data Centre (DC).

Regional Edge Data Centre

This is where LEDCs regional DCs sit. The regional edge space is the 1-5ms latency bracket, commonly thought of as the ‘user experience bracket.’ It’s where end-user systems required for BAU (Business As Usual) should sit for the best customer experience. It allows organisations to relocate key applications to a more resilient and secure location offering maximum uptime. This potentially removes a previous requirement for an internal data centre, thereby freeing up CapEx and resources.

Metro Data Centre

This is where the big public clouds live and is perfect for organisations based in metro areas including Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. If you can hit these locations within 5ms then they can support a majority of your IT requirements. However,if parts of your business sit outside that 5ms bracket, they are still great for less-sensitive applications like DR (Disaster Recovery) sites or hosting public facing websites etc.

PROS

  • Located on-site for ease and speed of management
  • Near zero latency
  • Potential for low cost of ownership

CONS

  • Ongoing CapEx investment in infrastructure
  • Low scalability
  • Requires in-house staff certifications to manage
  • Security, power and cooling challenges
  • Service providers have to connect to your DC

PROS

  • Closer to your users for a better experience
  • Built to Tier-3 data centre standards
  • Scalable space with high density power
  • State-of-the-art security
  • Business continuity, 99.985% uptime SLA
  • IT infrastructure is located in regional centre
  • Fixed OpEx investment versus CapEx uncertaint
  • 24/7 monitoring
  • Can connect to 3rd party service providers i.e. telco, public clouds, MSP
  • Pathway to digital transformation

PROS

  • Huge variety of service providers i.e. telco, public clouds, MSPs
  • Great for running non-critical applications if you’re regionally-located
  • Multiple low-cost storage options
  • Cheaper than building your own on-site DC

CONS

  • Latency issues running critical applications in regional Australia
  • IT infrastructure is distant in metro cities
  • Reliance on 3rd party remote hands for break-fix
  • Regular maintenance involves time and travel
  • Reliability and cost of connectivity between regional centres and metro cities
Latency
<1ms
1-10ms
11-100ms

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