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“By 2025 more than 50% of enterprise-managed data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud,” according to Gartner®.1Telcos with 5G towers, retailers, warehouses, medical clinics and cloud service providers with edge services are driving this trend, but challenges with traditional 3-tier architectures and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) limit enterprises from fully meeting their edge data centre requirements. One such challenge is the limited real estate available for infrastructure at the edge, which often has space for no more than two servers. Most HCI solutions require a minimum of three nodes and a network switch. There are HCI vendors that advertise a 2-node solution, but they require the customer to purchase a network switch, set up a quorum witness (QW) on another customer-provided server or instance in the cloud, then maintain it on an ongoing basis. And because HCI overheads consume 25% of server resources for data services, customers are often forced to purchase more servers and software licenses than necessary, a massive cost for large edge deployments.

The Nebulon smartEdge solution with 2-node cluster configuration support eliminates the need for the customer to set up and maintain a third server quorum witness. Instead, Nebulon manages a single quorum witness for all edge deployment sites in the Nebulon cloud, Nebulon ON. By providing the quorum witness as a service in Nebulon ON, administrative tasks related to hosting and maintaining the quorum witness are eliminated. Eliminating the third node while still providing a highly available configuration also equates to significant cost savings, as one-third fewer server and software licenses are needed across hundreds or even thousands of edge locations. Nebulon also announced support for switchless clusters for 2-node deployments, resulting in additional density and cost savings.

The Nebulon 2-node solution is not only ideal for distributed edge deployments, but it also provides a lower entry point for new cost-constrained ones. The solution is an affordable high-availability alternative for enterprises looking to stretch the cluster across two racks for protection against partner node, power and top-of-rack (ToR) switch failures.

¹Gartner, “Predicts 2022: The Distributed Enterprise Drives Computing to the Edge” by Thomas Bittman, Bob Gill, Tim Zimmerman, Ted Friedman, Neil MacDonald, Karen Brown. 20 Oct 2021.
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