Azure IoT Edge runs inside an NGD SSD

Source: blocksandfiles.com

Computational storage supplier NGD has embedded the Azure IoT Edge service within its SSDs.

NGD has announced the 32TB Newport SSD in the U.2 (2.5-inch) form factor, twice the capacity of the first Newport drive. This is NVMe-connected and uses less than 12W.

Azure IoT Edge facilitates access to the Azure cloud using on-premises hardware. Azure workloads can be run on-premises without having to send data to the Azure cloud for processing.

By doing this Azure IOT Edge devices can process data faster and react to local events in less time than it takes to send the data to the cloud. 

Generally the Azure IoT Edge code runs in a server. The NGD pitch is that data comes in to such a server, gets stored on its local storage, and is then fetched into memory for processing by the server CPU.

Nader Salessi, NGD CEO, said the technology “brings compute directly to the data, so processing results at the edge, right where data is created, is possible, significantly improving latency of the system.”

The Ubuntu-running ARM CPU embedded in the Newport drive processes Azure IOT data in-situ and faster than the host server. According to NGD there are “almost no changes to current code requirements”. Code that runs in an X86 Azure IoT Edge server will need to be changed so that it can run in the NGD device’s ARM-Ubuntu system.

The 32TB Newport and other NGD computational storage devices running Azure IoT Edge are available for deployment.