Data Centre Buildings

What is the ‘Metro Edge’

Metro Edge is typically a small data centre of 5-20 racks that sits within an urban area; this could be in a variety of locations, a telecom’s site, a private enterprise site, such as a warehouse or office or within its own compound. Sitting at the periphery of the network, the ‘Metro Edge’ facility gathers and processes locally produced data. As part of a distributed network, they will connect with other Edge and central data centres.

What’s their value?

These facilities provide the infrastructure for the delivery of a wide range of electronic services and applications, such as IoT, AI, 5G, healthcare, unmanned vehicles, smart factories and warehousing.

Benefits of Edge Data Centre infrastructure include:

Low Latency – this is probably the most significant benefit of the infrastructure, minimising the time taken for transmission of data, an essential component, in delivering human ‘experiential’ services such as gaming, films, music etc., or for the critical applications run by machine-to-machine interaction, and healthcare services.

Reliability – they operate as a distributed network, where workloads are shared across chains of smaller data centres. Therefore, if, in the unlikely event that an Edge data centre does go offline, then workloads can be quickly distributed to other Edge data centres within the distributed network to ensure 100% uptime of services. The Edge infrastructure also helps to reduce strain on centralised data centre resources, with reduced backhaul, by caching and processing data at the point of production.

Security – because they process data locally, security is increased as less travels over the network, where it is most vulnerable to cyberattack.

Metro Edge Data Centre Buildings

In providing the required Edge data centre infrastructure, operators are faced with two principal challenges.

Speed of Deployment

New Edge data centre infrastructure needs to be made available quickly to match the rapid and ever-increasing growth of data-producing devices and services. The traditional approach to designing and building data centres via a new build project or refurbishment/re-purposing of existing premises takes too long, is costly, and can negatively impact the environment. In contrast, scalable, modular, sustainable, pre-engineered facilities that can be deployed in just a few months or even weeks as part of a planned roll-out provide a much better and more efficient solution.

Location, Location, Location

Location is crucial in ensuring these new facilities are located close to locally produced sources of data; they also need to be secure and have access to connectivity and electrical power; with suitable premises becoming scarcer, many providers are deploying pre-engineered scalable data centres. These prefabricated, factory-produced, modular data centres provide a really agile approach. Not only can they be sized to scale with demand, but they can also be pretty much installed in any environment where there is suitable connectivity and power.

Workspace Technology Ltd Metro Data Centre Buildings.

Workspace Technology provides turnkey delivery of factory produced, pre-engineered data centres, from design through construction, site ground services, installation, commissioning, and comprehensive support services including monitoring.

These scalable, modular facilities are self-contained: racks, cooling, gas fire suppression, UPS and power distribution equipment all included in the build, ready for plug and play deployment.

The prefabricated units undergo granular factory acceptance and integrated systems testing prior to despatch.

Workspace Technology’s Edge data centres can be located in any environment, highly secure enclosures that are fire, water and heatproof, and where necessary, can also include Blast, RF, and acoustic shielding.

The prefabricated units are available in a wide range of agile formats, from small two or three rack pods to multi-storey systems accommodating hundreds of racks, with densities up to 60 kW per rack.

The Data Centre pre-fabs are designed and produced entirely within the UK at Workspace Technology’s production facilities based in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.

For more details of our comprehensive Prefabricated Edge Data Centre offer, please contact us at sales@workspace-technology.com or 0121 362 7770.

Return to Knowledge Hub