IBM and Cisco are working together on the Internet of Things. Their latest collaboration is on the use of Edge Analytics. (IBM’s announcement, on partnering with Cisco, and Cisco’s covering the links between cognitive computing and edge analytics., and IBM’s developerWorks blog entry introducing edge analytics.)
Now a single sensor may not send that much data into the cloud, several sensors together can create a huge volume. The example given is an oil field with 7000 wells, and 100 sensors per well, with measurements every second. The volume of data soon mounts up. So each well could generate petabytes of data per day. And if this is off-shore, then a significant chunk of bandwidth can be eaten just shipping this to the cloud.
So Edge Analytics will blend the computation in the cloud, with data availability close to the sensor, and offer a different way of delivering analytics across the data collected.
