Powering real-time data processing and enabling AI inferencing that improves customer experiences and operational efficiency, edge systems are foundational to digital transformation.
However, designing these systems requires more than traditional IT knowledge. It demands a blend of skills, foresight, and lessons learned from years of IoT evolution.
Specialized Skills for Edge System Design
Successful edge systems must constantly operate at peak performance within constrained, often unpredictable environments. Designing and building edge infrastructure requires a combination of hardware, software, and networking skills with expertise in hardware availability and fault-tolerance, workload virtualization, data governance, and cybersecurity.
While these skills draw upon common IT practices, they are applied differently in edge and AI environments. The edge is typically a unique, heterogeneous environment where limited connectivity, security needs, and scarce on-site IT pose greater challenges. Additionally, although hardware availability and fault-tolerance – meaning 99.999% availability or better – are valued, this is not an area of wide expertise. As a result, there is an increasing demand for expertise from OEMs, systems integrators, and service providers well-versed in these technology nuances that can seamlessly and rapidly deploy and simply manage edge infrastructure at scale.
Preparing for an Edge-Driven Future
Technology and business professionals must prepare for the edge. For most companies, the edge is where products are made and customers are served, making it critical to both customer satisfaction and competitive advantage.
To stay competitive, tech and business professionals need to run highly efficient edge operations that support “always-on” applications and continuous data availability. These low-latency, secure, and value-added operations rely on evolving IT and OT capabilities at the edge that professionals need to track, understand, and implement when appropriate.
For example, AI inference will fuel the need for reliable, powerful edge systems that bolster the accessibility and reliability of AI-generated recommendations and enable widespread automation. Edge AI will become a key piece of tech and business leaders’ digital-first strategy. Learning, understanding, and preparing for the edge is essential.
IoT Lesson Learned: Resilience is Non-Negotiable
To understand how to build these resilient systems, we can draw valuable lessons from years of IoT deployment experience. Businesses and customers expect an IoT experience that offers uninterrupted system and application availability. Let’s face it, we are information hungry and impatient! All kidding aside, operations teams often have real-time requirements in ensuring safety and efficiency. Yet distributed systems involve thousands of devices operating in unpredictable environments with unreliable connections.
The need to design resilience into the system has been a major IoT lesson. We’ve learned that recovering systems after an outage is not enough. Systems should ensure uninterrupted operations. IoT systems must continue to provide essential services even if operating at reduced capacity due to hardware issues, compromised communications, or other problems. Self-diagnosing, self-repairing systems with automated maintenance capabilities that manage workloads gracefully are key to IoT success.
A related IoT lesson is the constant and real threat of cyberattacks. Real-time monitoring and protection have proven to be essential to mitigating cybersecurity risks. This requires IoT infrastructure purpose-built for these environments that allows IT and OT teams to easily detect, isolate, and eliminate risks before data, operations, or the business is affected. We’ve seen that IT and OT teams can more easily manage these challenges by standardizing on a robust computing infrastructure designed for IoT’s diverse environments.
We’ve also learned that maintaining high-performance distributed systems at scale is a challenge. Remote device management, firmware updates, and troubleshooting across thousands of geographically dispersed edge nodes present logistical challenges. Edge architectures that incorporate automated management, simplified maintenance, and seamless orchestration capabilities alongside predictive failure detection help resource-constrained IT and OT teams maintain large-scale deployments.
These lessons collectively point toward the value of a fault-tolerant edge within an IoT system architecture, which, of course, affects how engineers approach distributed system design.
Business Benefits of IoT: Efficiency, Insight, and Expertise
Operational efficiency and customer satisfaction have been IoT’s most noteworthy impacts. When done right, customers are benefiting at the same time businesses streamline processes, increase product quality, and improve service delivery. Business leaders benefit from enhanced insights and actionable intelligence that help them drive better outcomes and open new revenue streams.
IT and operations teams gain the benefits of real-time monitoring and control of processes, automation that enhances human operators, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks. This all leads to higher productivity at a lower total cost of ownership. This also adds up to better customer experiences that ultimately help the company win in highly competitive and dynamic markets.
We see these benefits across industries, including manufacturing, retail, and healthcare. In manufacturing, for example, Industrial IoT (IIoT) has been central to predictive maintenance, quality control, and supply chain optimization deployments. Retail has adopted IoT for inventory management, customer analytics, and point of sale. Within healthcare, IoT supports back-office functions for customer service and shows tremendous potential in patient treatment via medical devices.
These IoT benefits underscore why designing and investing in resilient edge systems is critical and why organizations need systems that can reliably deliver these advantages at scale.
Build for What’s Next
It’s clear that the edge is more important than ever. It’s a foundation for intelligent, distributed systems. Designing resilient edge systems means applying lessons learned from IoT trends and evolution, embracing the unique demands of the edge environment, and preparing for an increasingly edge-driven AI future.
Organizations that invest in the right skills, strategic partnerships, and infrastructure today will be the ones well-positioned to capture long-term value.
Delivering high performance and high availability compute infrastructure solutions and services, Penguin Solutions is an expert in the infrastructure required to successfully deploy and run data intensive workloads from Edge to Core to Cloud—most notably Artificial Intelligence (AI), High Performance Compute (HPC), Fault-Tolerant (FT), and Edge Computing infrastructure. Reach out today to speak with one of our experts to learn more.
Stephen Greene
Vice President, Global Marketing
Stephen Greene is the Vice President of Global Marketing for Advanced Computing, Penguin Solutions. Stephen is responsible for product marketing and market development in the rapidly developing AI and Edge computing infrastructure market.
