Vapor IO’s latest edge data center effort, called Kinetic Edge, combines multiple micro-data centers to create virtual ones. The company claims these software-controlled virtual data centers can span an entire city and deliver cloud computing to the edge of the last-mile network.

Vapor IO also announced a new product: Vapor Edge Module. This is a self-contained, micro-modular data center designed to support edge colocation environments.

Kinetic Edge, which can be licensed to other companies, is the technical architecture for creating these virtual data centers. It consists of multiple Vapor Chambers (this is the company’s original micro-data center product) or Vapor Edge Modules, spaced between 10 km and 20 km apart. High-speed fiber connects the sites.

The software stack is based on Open Data Center Runtime Environment (Open DCRE), a platform for data center automation that the company open sourced in 2015.

“We start with Open DCRE,” Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO explained in an email. “We then add additional enterprise grade functionality on top of that. You cannot have a software-defined data center if the data center itself isn’t software-defined. Open DCRE was built and designed to allow for semantic control of both the building infrastructure and IT infrastructure so context can be created and allow for edge-native applications to exist.”

Developers can use the Vapor Edge APIs to build edge-native applications on top of the platform. These could include applications that respond to changing environmental conditions, or apps that perform high-resiliency failover, real-time load balancing, or workload migration for devices in motion.

The company is currently deploying Kinetic Edge in Chicago as part of Volutus, its edge data center-as-a-platform business. “Volutus is deploying Kinetic Edge under that brand, and we will offer it to customers on a colocation basis,” Crawford said. “Vapor IO will also work with other entities to deploy Kinetic Edge.”

The first Chicago site is operational, and a second will come online this month, Crawford said. More are planned for 2018. “We can deploy Kinetic Edge anywhere — at the base of cell towers, DAS [distributed antenna system] hubs, or other alternative real estate where sufficient power/fiber exists,” he said.

The company will announce customers at Mobile World Congress next year in Barcelona, Crawford added.