The abilities and reach of edge networks are receiving a boost thanks to a recently announced partnership between IBM and NVIDIA. IBM has launched a new edge solution, the IBM Edge Application Manager, on the NVIDIA EGX platform.
Generally speaking, edge computing denotes a distributed computing system that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed. This structure improves response times and saves bandwidth.
The IBM Edge Application Manager will enable users to deploy applications or AI models on up to 10,000 edge devices simultaneously, and the software will automatically manage the elements throughout their life cycles. The solution will run on the NVIDIA EGX platform, which debuted last October and supports edge application frameworks on NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs.
EGX is part of a larger ecosystem that includes more than 100 technology companies worldwide. The IBM Edge Application Manager has made it one of the largest partners for EGX as a whole.
According to IBM, Edge Application Manager enables improved flexibility and scalability. The software supports containers through Red Hat OpenShift, which means jobs can start and stop as microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes and deployed on devices running Docker. By minimizing data transport to central servers, IBM expects its solution to reduce vulnerabilities and costs and tap into new sources of data created and processed at the network edge.
The importance of edge networks and edge computing is becoming more and more apparent, according to Gartner, as “Around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud.” By 2025, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 75 percent.