Digital Realty Launches PlatformDigital

Digital Realty wants to be a platform for enterprise data infrastructure that builds on data gravity at the same time as data storage and processing are intensifying and moving to the edge of the network. 

Data gravity is the notion that data becomes harder to move as its scale and volume increases. The implication is that processing and apps move to where the data resides. As the Law of Gravity states that the attraction between objects is directly proportional to their weight or mass, so big data is said also to tend to attract applications and services. 

But we might be overstating the data gravity argument, as perhaps it is the availability of affordable processing at scale that attracts the data. 

At the same time, scale and performance requirements seem also to be migrating closer to the places where apps are used, at the edge, either for reasons of end user experience (performance), the cost of moving data, security and governance reasons, the cost of processing or scope effects (ability to wring more value from the same data). 

Digital Realty’s new PlatformDigital architecture essentially tries to ride both trends, data gravity that centralizes and also performance and cost issues that push processing to the edge. 

"Gartner predicts that by 2022, 60 percent of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers,” Digital Reality says. 

It remains to be seen how computing architecture evolves. In principle, either data gravity or zero gravity could develop. In fact, some of us might argue zero gravity is counterbalanced by the  likely emergence of edge computing as key trends. 

Zero gravity might be said to be a scenario where processing happens so efficiently wherever it is needed that gravitational pull, no matter what causes it, is nearly zero. In other words, processing and storage grow everywhere, at the same time, at the edge and center. 

A better way of imagining the architecture might be local versus remote, as, in principle, even a hyperscale data center sits at the network edge. We seem to be heading back towards a balance of remote and local, centralized and decentralized. Big data arguably pushes to decentralization while micro or localized functions tend to create demand for edge and local processing.