Since I barely stand five feet tall, a t-shirt I’ve seen and often contemplated buying says “I’m not small, I’m fun-sized!” Well, I think that could also make a great tagline for something our vice president and general manager of Internet of Things (IoT) Andy Rhodes called “small and mighty.”
He was referring to the Edge Gateway 3000 Series we launched at Mobile World Congress today, which will enable our customers to connect the unconnected where they couldn’t before.
Edge computing is predicted to be the next multibillion dollar technology market. But what is it?
One way to illustrate is to look at some of the ideal locations for the Edge Gateway 3000. They include places like a refrigerator trailer, a remote oil pump in the desert, digital signs in an elevator, inside of the HVAC units on a roof-top of a casino, even in the car you drive – or the car you let drive you.
You see edge computing means rather than sending a lot of data back to a central location before processing it, the ability to start processing can begin at the edges of the network. Internet-connected devices, the Internet of Things, can analyze and generate knowledge from the data at the source.
The Gateway 3000 Series joins Dell’s line of IoT-enabling hardware including the Edge Gateway 5000 Series, and Embedded Box PC 3000 and 5000 Series.
These products are already enabling our customers to do some pretty cool things that bring you benefits you probably haven’t even realized. For instance, did you know that 33 percent of all food is wasted because of spoilage caused by inefficient supply chains?
Many retail and grocery store food refrigeration units are managed locally with a store clerk and a clipboard. If a failure occurs, tons of food could be wasted. IMS Evolve, a U.K.-based dynamic monitoring company and a Dell IoT Solutions partner helps prevent this by connecting those refrigeration units and levering edge computing to automate alerts and enable proactive service that improves your food quality.
“We saw a great potential partner with the same vision and architectural approach to IoT,"says Jason Kay, chief commercial officer at IMS Evolve. "Dell’s supply chain, its existing relationships with prospective customers, and its ability to deploy and support environments at massive scale opens doors for us.”
The new Edge Gateway 3000 Series is designed by our expert team of rugged product engineers and put through a rigorous 10-step testing process in our IoT Labs. It’s ideal for both fixed and mobile use cases requiring smaller sensor networks, tight spaces and simpler analytics. The product line was designed per tens of thousands of hours of feedback through customer advisory councils, industry consortiums and market feedback.
For example, The Weir Group, a customer of ours that has embarked on a Digital Transformation journey to transform the historically traditional mining industry.
“Together, we’re building solutions based on Dell Edge Gateways for some of the world’s most challenging industrial environments that will allow us to easily monitor large, remote equipment and make better business decisions based on the data,” said Andrew Neilson, director of strategy, The Weir Group.
The 3000 Series includes three unique models that broaden the use cases of our technology from such large equipment to embedded solutions in the industrial automation, digital signage and transportation markets.
Remember that car I mentioned that might be driving you one day? Well… probably before that happens for most of us, our Edge Gateway 3002 (spot it in the photo above) will be helping manage a transportation fleet or connecting shipping containers and refrigerated trucks.
The Dell Edge Gateway 3000 Series will be available in early summer 2017 in select countries. And with its greater ruggedness for extreme environments, there’s no telling how far to the edge of edge computing it may go.