Vapor IO and Digital Realty today announced the availability of Vapor IO's software-defined Kinetic Edge interconnection technology in Digital Realty's colocation facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas. The companies first announced the partnership to enable a core-to-edge offering in October 2019, and plan to eventually deploy the Kinetic Edge technology in all of Digital Realty’s U.S. colocation facilities. 

The initial markets will serve as a testing ground for edge-native applications and workloads that require interconnection, low latency, and high throughput. “Now customers have the ability to leverage their existing deployments within Digital Realty and extend that capability out into these Vapor IO environments,” said Chris Sharp, EVP and CTO at Digital Realty.

That allows the companies’ customers to “transact on data or actively collect data more pervasively out toward that edge to deliver their proof-of-concept toward whatever workload they’re really trying to deliver,” he added.

This framework lays the foundation for real-time traffic flows in industrial automation and environments where IoT sensors that require low latency are poised to proliferate, according to Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford. “That’s where edge-to-core traffic starts making a lot of sense for a lot of enterprises, cloud companies, and wireless companies,” he said

Both executives declined to say when these capabilities would be available across Digital Realty’s data center footprints, but they independently recognize that the infrastructure needs to be pervasive and delivered in a repeatable fashion.

“I don’t think we want to extend a tremendous amount of capital on a build-it-and-they-will-come model, but we absolutely see, I would say, critical trends lines in workloads requiring a new type of environment to be from that core all the way out to the edge,” Sharp said. 

That expansion also rides on Vapor IO’s ability to bring its interconnection edge computing technology to more markets. The company raised $90 million in a Series C funding round earlier this year to expand beyond its initial four U.S. cities to a total of 36 cities with multiple edge computing locations in each market by the end of 2021, reaching up to 70% of the U.S. population. 

Vapor IO’s expansion effort stalled in previous years — in mid-2018 it said more than 100 locations would be live by the end of 2020 — and now it plans to have about 20 cities with multiple locations each up and running by the end of this year.

There are some intricacies in building out the edge that aren’t fully appreciated by the industry at large, Crawford said. “Zoning and permitting, as an example, that in many markets takes over 12 months," he explained. "The edge has never been about putting a small shipping container in a field. There are companies in our industry that think that’s the edge, and that’s certainly not Vapor’s edge. The Kinetic Edge overall is colocation, networking, and the exchange. If there’s nothing to interconnect with, I guess you could put a data center in a field and call it a great disaster recovery site, but that’s it.”

The success of these proof-of-concept markets will “dictate future markets and also dictate capabilities within those markets,” Sharp said, adding that both companies are keen on learning demonstrable benefits of the variability and fit-for-purpose service that their partnership aims to deliver.