Storage company ClearSky Data partnered with Packet for an edge deployment at an SBA Communications tower site in the Boston area.

Packet and SBA initially teamed up late last year on an edge data center at the base of the SBA cell tower in Foxborough, Massachusetts. That edge site, which uses Packet’s bare-metal compute infrastructure, went live early this year.

“We believe this was the first edge data center at a tower site in the U.S.,” said Clay Moran, director of strategy at SBA. “We have 16,000 towers in the U.S., so we believe those are potential sites for edge computing, but we are testing that concept out at Foxborough.”

SBA is one of the country’s largest cell tower owners. The company also owns towers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Peru.

Moran said the company has other edge partnerships in the works, but he won’t name names. “We are talking to a lot of the players in the edge space. The opportunity is to utilize our existing assets to enable 5G applications and to support 5G and lower latency and emerging use cases. We think there could be demand for edge compute facilities across the country, and at this point we’re just testing and learning and seeing what it takes to create that infrastructure.”

The new partnership with ClearSky includes that vendor’s interconnection, storage, backup, and disaster recovery services, so customers can power high-performance edge applications and workloads from this site. This is ClearSky’s first edge deployment with Packet. But the company has already shown how its disaggregated approach to storage makes it well suited for edge architectures and ensures that the data management and storage remain close to the customers.

“At this site we have some very high-speed, low-latency connectivity going back to our point-of-presence in the Boston area, a number of miles away,” said Laz Vekiarides, chief technology officer at ClearSky Data. “It’s a sub-millisecond latency so if a miss were to happen in a read you’re only a millisecond away from getting that data.”

Plus, the company’s Smart Tiered Caching technology maintains large, multi-tenant caches in major metros, “and we always push that data out to the cloud every 10 minutes,” Vekiarides added. “So even if the entire city and edge location were to go away, at most you would lose 10 minutes worth of data.”

The goal of the Foxborough site is essentially to create a model that can be replicated at other locations, so customers can use these joint Packet and ClearSky technologies “to take that data and leverage it across other locations where the platform exists,” Vekiarides said. “Over time as we have multiple Packet and ClearSky locations, we’ll be able to locate that data across multiple locations.”

Packet and ClearSky won’t say where these other locations will be, but “we have other sites planned, and we are currently working to replicate with SBA what we’ve done in Foxborough but at a much larger scale,” said Jacob Smith, chief marketing officer at Packet. “I have a customer looking for another 21 sites.”

It’s worth noting that last week ClearSky joined the Kinetic Edge Alliance, of which Packet is also a member. This Vapor IO-led edge computing effort is live at three Chicago sites and one in Massachusetts, with a total of 15 planned for this year.

And the integration between Packet’s compute and ClearSky’s storage makes the services “very replicatable,” Vekiarides said. Smith added: “I don’t think anything in our solution that we’re working on here is tied to a particular real estate or colocation. It can be replicated anywhere the customer wants.”

ClearSky is the first storage partner that Packet is working with at the edge, Smith said, noting that the company chose ClearSky not only for its storage technology but also its “very sophisticated interconnection. One of the first use cases we’re seeing is hybrid cloud where you’re doing latency-sensitive applications. You tend to run into the two issues of storage and interconnection.”

ClearSky’s data security capabilities also play an important role in edge computing, he said.

“The edge is compute heavy and relatively storage light in terms of actual, physical media, and the reason for that is we encrypt at wire speed,” Vekiarides added. “All of the data from all of our customers get encrypted immediately upon ingest, upon whatever media is local to that location, it’s sent encrypted on the wires, its cache encrypted on our network, and it’s sent encrypted to the cloud.”