The explosion of Internet of Things-connected devices is pushing the need for high-performance computing farther out onto the edge and away from centralized data centers. The backbone of edge computing is hyperconverged infrastructure, and Nutanix Inc. is often thought of as the pioneer of HCI.

Nicolaus Radford, co-founder and chief technology officer at Houston Mechatronics Inc., a robotics company in the oil and gas industry, shared the story of how his company is taking advantage of Nutanix’s HCI to automate and control its fleet of robotics.

“There are a lot of people out there that sell robots, but that’s kind of a thin business. You might sell a robot, and the people that buy it use it and make a bunch of money on it. And you’re stuck trying to find a new customer,” Radford said. “If you consume the robots that you build and use them as a service, it’s a much more lucrative position to have. And so we do technology systems development for partners, and then we also operate them in the the field for them, so it’s a good residual revenue stream for us.”

Radford and Satyam Vaghani, vice president of technology at Nutanix Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Washington D.C. (* Disclosure below.)

Real-time control for robots on the edge

Houston Mechatronic’s robotic control use case is a classic example of the relationship between edge computing and centralized cloud infrastructure.

“Our robot travels through the pipe, collecting all of its data, but it’s afforded all of the knowledge on making its decisions based on back learning, like what deformities look like. … The processing of that data is being done right there, but its all being shipped back to the cloud at a later date for further analytics and then fed-forward for the next day of operations,” Radford said. “So it’s this feedback process of learning between the application that’s happening real time and the later-on analytics that will occur.” 

Using edge-computing technology such as HCI on the IoT edge, dramatically reduces the amount of data that needs to be processed in the centralized cloud because a lot of the heavy lifting is handled locally, according to Vaghani.

“In terms of volume, a very small fraction of that data is going to make it to the cloud, but in terms of intelligence, almost 100 percent of intelligence is going to make it,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE Media