In Andy Patrizio’s article published in Network World, he explains how the rise of edge computing and related surge in data produced by the internet of things requires the function of enterprise data centers to shift to handling long-term data aggregation and analysis.

The Internet as we have all known it mirrors the design of old mainframes with dumb terminals: The data path is almost entirely geared toward data coming down the network from a central location. It doesn’t matter if it’s your iPhone or a green text terminal, the fast pipe has always been down, with relatively little data sent up.

The arrival of IoT threatens to turn that on its head. IoT will mean a massive flood of endpoint devices that are not consumers of data, but producers of it, data that must be processed and acted upon. That means sending lots of data back up a narrow pipe to data centers.

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