Technology continues to expand to the edge, helping to solve problems in the real world. Take wildfires for example. Fires like those in California have intensified in recent years as the world faces increasingly dry and hot climates due to climate change — and technology can play an important role in combating them.

In addition to satellites, drones and robots, edge computing is an innovation that can improve government efforts to fight the fire, allowing data needed for work to be processed quickly on site, according to Troy Massey (pictured, left), director of enterprise engagements at Iron Bow Technologies, an IT solutions provider for government, commercial and healthcare clients.

“They take an entire squadron of airplanes out, and they throw water over all the whole fire. And they don’t just bring planes; they bring entire squadrons of military personnel to help communicate with the police and with the local fire. And all of that takes information,” Massey said. “So, they need to bring information data with them. Is there a building over there? Do people live over there where we’ve got to actually concentrate on fighting that fire priority-wise?”

This information forms a large block of data that needs to be local to the consumer, so it may be more efficient to process it at the edge than remotely by satellite, Massey pointed out.

Massey and Jon Siegal (pictured, right), vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. They discussed Iron Bow’s prospects for using edge computing, as well as Dell’s bet on that technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell expects the edge ‘to explode’

To provide solutions at the edge for its customers, Iron Bow relies on Dell EMC VxRail, a hyperconverged system delivering virtualization, compute and storage in one appliance. VxRail has been increasingly adopted at the edge by different businesses, such as large retailers, home improvement chains and financial institutions, according to Siegal.

Dell sees a very promising market for VxRail in this environment. “We expect the edge to soon explode. We like to think that we are at the edge of the edge opportunity in IT,” Siegal said.

In fact, IDC recently stated that by 2023 over 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployed will be at the edge rather than corporate datacenters, up from less than 10% today. “This is massive,” Siegal added.

But the technology comes with its own challenges, such as less than ideal power and cooling conditions and the lack of a typically qualified IT staff on site. To help solve the problem of lack of skills in distributed environments, Dells is extending the automated operations of VxRail to the edge and doing so at scale.

“We are introducing a new software as-a-service multicluster management,” Siegal explained. “This not only provides a global view of the infrastructure performance and capacity analysis across all the locations, but even more importantly, it actively ensures that all the clusters in the remote locations always stay in a continuously validated state.”

This means that companies can automatically determine which software components need to be updated and automatically run them, capability that was previously possible only at the core in the cloud.

“The idea to remotely manage that VxRail … but not just manage it, [do] predictive analysis on when they’re starting to run out of storage, give alerts so that we can start the upgrade,” Massey said.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE