To find oil, an energy company might drill into areas of mixed rock types—limestone, dolomite, shale, anhydrite, one of dozens of variables—and the temperature might hit 300 degrees at the drill bit, 20,000 feet below the surface.
At any moment, sensors might indicate a change in the temperature, pressure, or behavior of the expensive equipment in play, posing a critical question to the operators: What adjustments do we need to make to avoid damage to the equipment and nonproductive time? Answering this question accurately can be worth more than a million dollars per day, per well. But if it takes hours to receive an answer from a data center or the cloud, drilling operations could be put at financial risk. The company needs edge computing.
Edge computing means getting answers quickly—in milliseconds. By keeping compute, storage, data management, and control at the edge, companies can minimize insight delay and reduce data backhaul bandwidth requirements. It also lowers overall operations costs because it is no longer necessary to synchronously move large amounts of data back and forth to a regional data center or the cloud.