Self-Learning Series Part 1: Understanding NativeEdge
Fri, 13 Oct 2023 11:52:00 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
We are experiencing a fundamental design shift, driven by a perfect storm that is occurring at the edge. First, we are seeing massive amounts of data being created by data sources, from sensors, robotics, video, and other devices, most of which never existed until recently.
Second, a new generation of technology has matured which enables us to derive value from that data in near real time. Technologies such as AI and machine learning, paired with small form factor computing and low latency 5G networking, enable us to capture, curate, analyze, and act faster than ever before. Multicloud has also matured to the point where companies can leverage any cloud platform for monitoring, reporting, and model training.
Most importantly, unique challenges require a new approach to the edge. The diversity of hardware and environments makes testing, integrating, deploying, and managing hardware and associated software a critical design point. Edge application workloads are challenging because they must support diverse use cases like computer vision in manufacturing or inventory management in retail. Large-scale geo-distributed locations such as retail stores and distribution centers elevate business-level concerns surrounding security, support, and efficient distributed systems operations.
Addressing the Challenges at the Edge
The edge, by its very nature, has unique challenges. Together, data and the technologies that capture it are defining a new set of challenges, implications, and constraints that are fundamentally different than those involved with core datacenter and cloud models.
- Due to environmental diversity, lifecycle management of hardware and its associated software becomes difficult, and large-scale edge deployments become a significant challenge. Complexities range from the type of network connections to the level of ruggedization and configurations.
- OT workloads at the edge need to support both legacy and next-generation workloads deployed in various forms, such as virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless designs. The technology underpinnings must be stable, secure, and highly available to meet the needs of these "edge-native" apps.
- Distributed edge deployments, such as those found in retail outlets and distribution centers, elevate business-level concerns around security, support, and efficient distributed systems operations. Physical and logical security is crucial as the attack surface of an organization massively expands. Zero-trust security concepts must be applied from the supplier network to the production floor.
- Managing these distributed systems in locations without technical personnel must be simple, scalable, and facilitate easy repairs. Systems must be fundamentally zero-touch once plugged in and powered on.
- Secure operations, including the ability to deploy and secure workloads anywhere, and to centrally monitor and report on technical and business-level changes, is another critical concern at the edge. Application orchestration solutions designed for edge deployments must be able to deploy these operations workloads to the cloud of their choice.
Attempts to solve edge challenges with use-case-specific, bespoke solutions have resulted in technology silos that become operational nightmares as use cases and workloads increase over time.
These challenges are driving business and technology requirements towards a new approach—one that avoids these operational roadblocks.
The New Frontier of your Edge Strategy
At Dell, we’re changing how we approach these challenges by creating a new management and orchestration platform for the edge.
This new approach allows us to tackle these edge challenges and avoid the case-by-case solutions that result in technology silos that are difficult to scale and manage. We understand that edge infrastructure management is a large undertaking for any organization.
There is a need to reimagine edge management operations whereby enterprises can orchestrate the entire lifecycle management of applications, anywhere and anytime. They need to be empowered to scale their edge operations with consistency and security for any use case. They must be able to simplify their operations, optimize their edge investment, and secure their distributed edge estate easily.
Simply extending traditional IT and datacenter-centric practices to manage your edge estate does not work. We need a new approach to address the unique challenges at the edge.
We’ll get you started by breaking down these challenges and their solutions to help improve the application lifecycle management, and to elevate the efficiency of OT and IT teams and their collaborative productivity.
The New Approach is Ready for Action
Dell NativeEdge is an edge operations software platform that helps businesses securely scale their edge management across their distributed edge estate. NativeEdge centralizes edge management across locations, automates operations, offers flexibility with its open design, enables zero-trust security, and provides multicloud connectivity. With NativeEdge, enterprises across various industries can securely power any edge application, anywhere, to achieve their specific business goals.
The platform also prioritizes partnerships and leverages a broad ecosystem of independent software vendors, system integrators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and channel partners to deliver tailored solutions to customers through their preferred technology providers.
NativeEdge is designed to be cost-effective by offering subscription-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) options.
The platform streamlines edge management across different industries, including but not limited to: retail, manufacturing, energy, digital cities, and healthcare. While it can be used to deploy and manage a small edge environment (a single edge site with just a few edge compute endpoints), it seamlessly scales up for deploying and operating more complex edge compute estates (multiple edge sites with many edge compute endpoints).
Orchestration
At the center of NativeEdge is the orchestrator, which supports edge operations such as application orchestration, fleet management, and life cycle management. Packaged as Helm charts, the NativeEdge Orchestrator can be deployed anywhere a dedicated Kubernetes cluster exists. For example, the Kubernetes cluster can be on-premise inside a VM or bare-metal server. Once the NativeEdge Orchestrator is deployed, customers can easily add NativeEdge-enabled Devices into the edge estate with secure device onboarding and zero-touch provisioning.
To learn more about how to simplify edge operations at scale, click here to see an interactive flip-book.
Automation
With the industry’s broadest portfolio of edge infrastructure hardware and our industry-leading secure supply chain, we can digitally sign and certify hardware in the factory. The chain starts at first power-on, which automates the deployment and configuration of the edge infrastructure that is managed by NativeEdge while ensuring a zero-trust chain of custody.
Users are able to eliminate operational complexity at scale with centralized management using blueprint-based deployment, zero-touch provisioning, automated onboarding operations of infrastructure, and applications from edge to multicloud.
This new paradigm eliminates supply chain risks and integration failures. It ensures that the entire solution is consistently installed properly and helps consolidate multiple applications and use cases into one architecture. Users can apply automated workflows simultaneously to thousands of devices across all locations.
To learn more about how to improve productivity and efficiency, click here to see an interactive flip-book.
Design
Built on an open design, NativeEdge offers the flexibility to choose the independent software vendor (ISV) and cloud environment for edge application workloads. You can centrally and consistently deploy containerized and virtual applications using blueprints to work with your choice of IoT framework and OT vendor.
Make the most of your edge investments using an open design that works with software applications, IoT frameworks, multi-vendor operations technology solutions, and multicloud environments. Users can reduce proof-of-concept development time and deliver a consistent experience across multiple hardware form factors and price points.
To learn more about how to optimize your edge investment, click here to see an interactive flip-book.
Security
All of these benefits mean absolutely nothing if they compromise an enterprise's security. The distributed nature of the edge and lack of technical staff make security and compliance the most business-critical pieces, determining the viability of any edge plan.
The platform is built from the ground up with zero-trust security principles. We alleviate security fears by delivering a platform that ensures the integrity of edge hardware from design to deployment, including within the supply chain, to protect applications and data through hardened blueprints and digitally signed package validation.
In many cases, local skilled resources are not available at the start of onboarding, which causes delays. NativeEdge only requires the skills needed to plug in and power on a device, and then automation takes care of everything else.
Zero trust is a security and network paradigm that seeks to prevent a violation of trust through users, applications, or devices.
- Zero trust focuses on authenticating, authorizing, and protecting these individual users, applications, and devices, irrespective of their physical or network location.
- Zero trust allows administrators to create users and assign role-based access control.
To learn more about how to secure with zero trust, click here to see an interactive flip-book.
Conclusion
Our goal for NativeEdge is to help customers securely scale their edge operations and to support any use case or combination of use cases, by enabling them to simplify their operations, optimize their investment, and secure their entire edge estate.
This new approach simplifies operations through integrated automation processes to streamline edge deployment and operations at scale, without relying on IT expertise in the field. NativeEdge does so with centralized management, zero-touch deployment and onboarding, and automated operations.
Our strong history of industry technology partnerships at the edge has resulted in a strong edge ecosystem that can leverage the open, vendor-agnostic design of the platform, enabling customers to optimize their edge investment. We support existing and new edge use cases with an open design that works with users' choice of software applications, IoT frameworks, OT vendor solutions, and multicloud environments. We put the customers in the driver’s seat to control their edge, and to not get locked into closed or vertically integrated vendor ecosystems.
Additional Resources
To learn more about NativeEdge features and benefits, click on the following links:
- NativeEdge - Interactive Guide
- Introduction to the Dell NativeEdge Software Platform - White Paper
- Blog - Dell NativeEdge Platform Empowers Secure Application Delivery
- Dell NativeEdge Product Page
- Video: NativeEdge in Action
- Forbes Article - Unleashing Innovation: Exploring the Intersection of DevOps and the Edge
- Interactive Demo: Dell NativeEdge
This blog is a part of a self-learning series. For more information on NativeEdge, go to: