While some say Internet of Things data requires next-generation computing at the edge, others wonder why not just put it in a container and zip it around like an application?

“Consider a world where you can just treat a database as a containerized thing and you can just move it from one piece of compute to another or one location to another,” said Laz Vekiarides, chief technical officer and co-founder of ClearSky Data.

While ClearSky’s data management and storage-as-a-service platform is not quite so simple as this, it is essentially the vision it is working toward, Vekiarides told Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. In an interview at theCUBE’s Boston, Massachusetts, studio, Vekiarides explained how ClearSky is building a data superhighway. (*Disclosure below.)

“We have a network. We have a unique data management stack, which takes advantage of the network to create a performance profile that is pretty much the same as local storage,” he said.

The difference is in how it optimizes a path solely for moving data as fast as possible, said Vekiarides. The path does not use internet, because the bandwidth is not adequate for massive amounts of data.

Living on the edge — or not?

This path is large and fast enough to take in the fire hose of data generated by IoT devices, said Vekiarides. Further, IoT data management will never begin and end at the edge.

“You need to aggregate it at some point. So where the aggregation point that’s local, that’s very low latency, that’s very, very fast, that provides you that landing pad where you can do your initial processing,” he said.

The cost benefit of a single platform for edge to cloud is significant, since there is no need to copy the data, he added.

Watch the full video interview below. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE