How IoT brings intelligence to the edge

Nutanix announced the general availability of Xi IoT, a new edge computing service offered as part of the company's Xi Cloud Services.

Combining core Nutanix solutions with a streamlined approach, Xi IoT supposedly eliminates complexity, accelerates the speed of deployment and elevates developers to focus on the business logic powering IoT applications and services.

In 2017, three billion enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices generated up to 30 times more data (256 ZB) than the 30+ million nodes across public and private cloud data centers.

But the current IoT model, in which the massive amounts of data on edge devices is sent back to a centralised cloud for processing, has severely limited the ability of customers to make real-time, actionable decisions from intelligence gained at the edge.

For customers, deriving value from this massive amount of data is rife with latency issues, lack of scalability, lack of autonomy, and compliance and privacy issues.

Unlike traditional IoT models, the Xi IoT platform supposedly delivers local compute, machine inference, and data services to perform real-time processing at the edge.

Xi IoT Data Pipelines can securely move intelligently analysed data to a customer's public (Azure, AWS or GCP) or private cloud platform of choice for long-term analysis.

Edge and core cloud deployments all operate on the same data and management plane, so Xi IoT customers have seamless, simplified insight into their deployment.

Because Xi IoT provides zero-touch setup and management of edge devices, organisations can mitigate the risk of IoT security breaches due to human error, increase overall efficiency and reduce the cost of operating edge devices across the globe.

IDC group VP Ashish Nadkarni says, "It is critical for enterprise organisations to have an edge strategy to unify, edge to cloud connectivity, to rapidly build IoT applications, and to provide real-time analytics closer to where the data is generated.

"For companies looking for a competitive advantage, solutions like this can help them stay ahead of the market and identify new opportunities to grow their businesses.

Through Xi IoT, customers can manage all their edge locations through an infrastructure and application lifecycle management tool, regardless of platform.

Developers can leverage a rich set of open APIs to deploy next-generation data science applications as containerised applications or as functions, which are small snippets of code.

This can be integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines, allowing them to make changes quickly from a single location.

By leveraging this framework, Xi IoT helps IT could organisations reduce training, development and testing costs while eliminating the possibility an organisation is locked into one public cloud provider.

And because data is processed in real-time at the edge, companies are supposedly no longer inhibited by the transmission of data back to a core data center for processing, so decisions can be made based on data autonomously and in real-time.