EDGE CENTRES
layer of critical infrastructure into urban environments where land is scarce and expensive means taking a very different approach to safeguarding edge data centres from unwanted attention than the “ wall it off behind barbed wire and seven layers of manned and autonomous biometric security ” approach favoured in colocation and hyperscale sites .
Taking a leaf right out of the 4G and 5G cell-tower camouflage playbook ( the same one that used to line New Mexico ’ s highways with giant fibreglass cacti full of telecommunications equipment and wants to turn every lamppost , electricity pole , and traffic light into a mmWave 5G antenna ) Eaves is discovering that anonymity presents a whole new kind of security . “ It ' s about making the silhouette , the shape , as much a part of the landscape as possible . We made it look like a pad transformer because , in Vietnam and Indonesia , there are pad transformers everywhere . We ' re making them appear familiar and thereby making them totally anonymous ,” he says . “ We set up cameras across the street and it ' s really cool to watch hundreds of thousands of people walking and driving past this box that ' s secretly full of servers and not give it a second look .”
Exploring the Edge Edge Centres ’ s projects in Bright and Jakarta are just two of the ways that Eaves and his growing team are working to understand – and in many ways create – the next phase of the edge ’ s development .
A collaboration with a leading university in Ho Chi Minh City , Vietnam , is not only giving Edge Centres true agnostic access to the country ’ s telco providers , but the presence of their facility is providing an
opportunity for the university to give trainee data centre technicians ( not to mention engineers looking to study networking , battery technology , solar power , etc .) a place to get hands on experience .
In Kuala Lumpur , Edge Centres is working in partnership with its Series A funding round investor , Cloud Link Solutions ( CLS ) – a rapidly growing cable landing station operator . “ We ' re gaining access to land in Malaysia , and they ' re in turn getting access to our technology which is going into the design and
48 August 2022