Western Digital has launched its Ultrastar Edge servers to support 5G networks and other communications in harsh environments.

If you ever take a trip to the Alaskan wilderness and have trouble streaming your live video of a bear chasing after you to your friends back home, then you might want to take one of these along. The servers can deliver high speeds and capacity for real-time analytics, AI, deep learning, ML training and inference, and video transcoding at the edge.

In all seriousness, these Ultrastar Edge servers can be lifesavers when it comes to creating rugged networks in harsh remote environments, the company said.

An expansion for WD

These servers are part of Western Digital’s goal of providing the foundation for the world’s essential data infrastructure. Western Digital will use the servers to bring computing power closer to where data is generated for faster processing, lower latency, and real-time decision making, even when disconnected.

With the growing adoption of 5G, internet of things, and the cloud, businesses and consumers expect super-fast performance with their applications. This is creating demand for new, distributed intelligent architectures outside of core data centers to help ingest, analyze and transform data at the edge. In addition, organizations are running applications in extremely remote locations, such as deserts, seas, or jungles, and are driving the need for ruggedized compute and storage where networks can be expensive, intermittent, or nonexistent.

Designed for cloud service providers, telcos and system integrators, Western Digital’s Ultrastar Edge servers are meant to be easy to transport, deploy and scale in the field, at colocation (colo) facilities, in a factory, or in remote data centers. The new family includes the Ultrastar Edge-MR, an extremely rugged, stackable and transportable server for military and specialized field teams working in harsh remote environments, and the Ultrastar Edge, a transportable two-unit, rack-mountable server with a portable case for colos and edge data centers. Both solutions are now sampling and orderable with general availability beginning the fourth quarter.

Why it matters

Manoj Sukumaran, senior analyst for datacenter compute at Omdia, said in a statement that more computing capacity is needed at edge locations as latency-sensitive applications are proliferating. He said he expects server deployments at edge locations to double through 2024, totaling an estimated five million units as they are an essential component in enabling new innovations and products, cloud services, remote campuses, CDNs, and virtually any vertical industry that relies on IoT, sensor, or remote data.

In the world of 5G and IoT, computing must happen at the edge – closer to devices, end-users, and the machines that are generating the data, he said, particularly where latency and bandwidth are essential factors for success. He said he is glad to see Western Digital enter the market as the industry needs reliable products from vendors they can trust.

Kurt Chan, vice president of data center platforms at Western Digital, said in a statement that, as a storage technology leader, Western Digital is constantly looking ahead and anticipating how it can continue to serve customers’ needs. The growth in data creation at the edge, the opportunities to extract value from that data, and the total available markets and customers innovating and doing work at the edge, gives the company an opportunity to launch its servers.

The specs

The Ultrastar Edge-MR is a rugged, stackable solution that is designed and tested in accordance with MIL-STD-810G-CHG-1 standards for limits of shock and vibration, and to the MIL-STD-461G standard for electromagnetic interference. The unit is also rated IP32 to provide protection against water and debris. Whether conducting a military operation, doing research in the Amazon, or analyzing data during oil and gas explorations, the Ultrastar Edge-MR can handle extremes, Western Digital said. Both Ultrastar Edge solutions also feature the Trusted Platform Module 2.0, a tamper-evident enclosure built to meet FIPS 140-2 Level 2 security standard to help store, secure, transfer, and disseminate sensitive data. One of the partners is Aeon Computing.

The core of each Ultrastar Edge solution is a durable, high-speed server that supports up to 40 cores with two Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, an Nvidia T4 graphics processing unit (GPU), and eight Ultrastar NVMe SSDs providing up to 61TB of storage. It features two 50Gb or one 100Gb Ethernet connection for sending critical data back to the cloud or data center when connected.