Wrapping up the year with Sunlight
The year is coming to a close and the festive season is upon us. We may still be in the midst of a global pandemic and our usual celebrations may look different to how they used to, but we can’t ignore the resulting digital transformation that has accelerated across a wide variety of industries. We have seen a rise in edge computing use cases, where data needs to be processed in real time and close to the source, paving the way for Sunlight infrastructure to create a positive outcome for the many affected enterprises.
Here we look back at some of the highlights and learnings of 2021, while also looking ahead to the new year.
The number of Sunlighters around the world grew by 52%
At a time when it’s harder than ever to retain and acquire new staff (2021 being the year of “the great resignation” worldwide), we’ve seen exceptional growth. Commercialising the Sunlight product in the midst of a pandemic, with the vast majority of people working from home, has meant that we’ve been able to keep and find the best people — wherever in the world they reside! Image 1 above is a map of all of our Sunlighters’ locations and can be found on the wall of our office in Crete, Greece. Not only does it show where Sunlighters can be found across the globe, it shows the variety of perspectives and considerations each person brings to everything we do.
We grew our partner ecosystem by 75%
Sunlight’s partners have been integral to our ability to provide the best possible service to our enterprise customers across industries and geographical locations. We set about the year looking for the best partners to support us to deliver our mission — to make deploying and managing applications, from Edge to Cloud, simple. Some of the biggest ISVs now feature in our marketplace (for example Splunk and Cloudera) — not to mention some of the most popular open source products (such as MariaDB and Kafka). We’ve also expanded the number of distributors, Managed Service Providers/Infrastructure as a Service providers (MSP/IaaSs) and hardware OEMs. Image 2 highlights some of these partnerships — with more to be announced in the new year.
Sunlight launched additional support for application performance and management
If releasing the most performant and efficient HCI to the market wasn’t enough, in 2021 Sunlight also made some important product announcements. We launched:
- NVIDIA GPU support for our NexVisor HCI stack. This allows the user to attach a GPU (PCI) device and run workloads on a guest instance — giving 100% GPU performance and greater density. Find out more
- The Sunlight Infrastructure Manager (SIM) dashboard provides a single pane of glass to manage and monitor resources, take backups, move workloads around and to deploy clusters. It can be deployed instantly on-demand inside AWS, via their Marketplace, or installed onto a Linux based Virtual Machine on the customer’s infrastructure. We also have Beta versions working in Equinix, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Find out more
- The Sunlight Marketplace is a component of the SIM and allows partners and enterprise customers to automatically deploy applications on demand to an unlimited number of edge locations with a single click. Built on Infrastructure-as-Code principles using the Ansible Framework, customers can choose from any number of pre-Installed recipes, import an existing Ansible recipe or add their own. Find out more
We made a name for ourselves
At Sunlight, we make some bold claims in our marketing about our edge when it comes to speed and performance. We rigorously test our own product and invite others to do the same using our performance testing site. It was important to us that this was validated by an independent third party. Analyst firm ESG (a division of TechTarget) conducted a technical review of the Sunlight product set and proved that Sunlight uses 98% less RAM and 82% less CPU than the two leading data center HCI solutions (see image 3). You can download the full report here.
Last but not least, we won two awards in 2021! We were named “Hottest Deeptech Startup 2021” at this year’s The Europas (a TechCrunch award) and “Hyper-Convergence Innovation of the Year ‘’ at the SDC Awards 2021.
What is the biggest learning we will take with us into the new year?
While the data center may not be dead (yet), we are seeing a seismic shift to edge computing, driven by four key factors: speed, autonomy, security and network bandwidth. There is no denying that, with technological advancements, there is an ever-increasing number of new use cases that can’t afford to transfer data to the cloud in order to process and gain insight. It is too slow and subject to outages and breaches.
Gartner® (2021) predicts that “By year-end 2023, 50% of large enterprises will have a documented edge computing strategy, compared to less than 5% in 2020. Edge computing will be on the frontlines of nearly all digital business strategies by 2025.”*
In addition, in 2022 we expect to see a shift to ARM-based processors gather pace. This is because edge devices are necessarily constrained, ruggedized, and operate with low power. This is very different from data center environments and is where ARM architecture processors excel, as they are significantly more efficient than the equivalent Intel x86 processor. As edge computing demands rise, so will demands for ARM-based processors — leading to their proliferation in 2022 and the years to come. The industry is already seeing some ‘big moves’ in this direction, with the potential ARM acquisition by Nvidia and the recently released Nvidia Jetson AI systems.
This quote by Ark Invest sums up the foreseeable move to ARM, “ARM and RISC-V are likely to displace Intel’s x86 in the cloud. Together they could grow 45% per year to reach $19 billion in CPU revenue and $100 billion in server revenue by 2030.”
Watch this space for more Sunlight news on edge computing and ARM in 2022.
*Gartner, Tech Providers 2025: The Future of Edge, October 2020. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
