Edge data center, the push of Open Fiber. Lazzaroli: “Construction underway mid-year”

“The Open Fiber fiber network is a highway on which a complex system will gradually be created, composed of edge data centers connected to each other and connected at very high speed to the large national data centers present in our country. Andrea Lazzaroli, Operational Marketing Business Market Manager of Open Fiber, illustrates the new technological challenges to CorCom for the development of smart cities but also of mission critical applications serving the country. “The Open Fiber network has characteristics that make it suitable for hosting edge data centers: it is distributed throughout the national territory and, today, is already present in over 5,000 Italian municipalities, from metropolises to small villages. On this network – entirely in optical fiber – there are around 3,000 Open Fiber sites whose size varies from large buildings in urban areas to shelters and street cabinets in small villages”.

Lazzaroli, what are the advantages of edge data centers compared to “traditional” ones?

An edge data center normally refers to a data center located at the “edges” of the network. However, the difference compared to centralized data centers is not only in the location, but also in the characteristics of the site and the quantity of sites. In particular, the progressive extension from centralized data centers to edge data centers implies a development towards sites characterized by a greater number and smaller size. Driving this evolution will be new technologies – such as 5G, IoT and artificial intelligence – and low latency services, already available but not yet so widespread on the market, including autonomous driving, augmented reality, smart cities and in general applications that require edge computing.

What is the market situation?

To date, approximately 43% of the space used for data center colocation is concentrated in the Milan area, however the center of gravity of the market is gradually moving also to the Rome area and central-southern Italy. Over the next few years, several international and national players have declared their intention to invest over 15 billion euros in Data Centers, and the new openings tend to confirm the trend towards the edge. The sectors that will most drive the development of this technology are undoubtedly those that require rapid response times such as, for example, access to content, and edge computing in which the distributed computing power no longer derives only from the device that is used, but also by contents and computers that are located nearby, on the network.

Let’s move on to the Open Fiber plan: what are the objectives?

Open Fiber is present on the market as an enabler of the country’s digital transformation, with the creation of a fiber optic network that connects families, schools, hospitals, public administrations and the main production sites distributed across most of the territory. national. With the introduction of edge data centers, Open Fiber aims to further facilitate digital transformation, also connecting the sites where data can be processed to its infrastructure. In this way, an end-to-end solution entirely in fiber is made available to operators, ranging from data collection (access networks) to local storage and processing (edge ​​data centers) to transport to the internet and exchange points (connection networks). transport). And Open Fiber’s objective is also to further simplify this end-to-end model by offering, to those who wish, a single reference for edge sites distributed throughout the national territory. Service users will benefit as they will be able to enjoy high performance for high-quality services, ranging from entertainment to applications related to productivity.

And what does the roadmap include in detail?

The first edge data centers will be built in the second half of 2024 and in the following months we will proceed to create a level of regional edge data centers connected to each other and to the large centralized data centers. This constitutes the first phase of the project which will be followed by an expansion phase of the regional sites up to the provincial level and beyond, entirely driven by market demand. The services made available will also increase over time. The starting point will be centered on two pillars. The first consists of hosting the equipment in dedicated islands within the Open Fiber sites, with specific solutions for power supply and cooling. The second consists of connecting the equipment to metropolitan networks and transport networks. Open Fiber is open to establishing partnerships with other entities who want to participate in the development of edge solutions, enriching the solution with other additional local services.