Sunlight Infrastructure Manager and Marketplace simplifies deployment of apps in edge environments
Sunlight launches its Sunlight Infrastructure Manager (SIM) and Marketplace to make it simple to deploy and manage infrastructure and applications in highly distributed Edge environments as well as in the Cloud – enabling true Edge ‘Software as a Service’ models. The SIM joins Sunlight’s NexVisor HCI to provide a complete software-defined Edge computing stack at a fifth of the cost of trying to deploy the leading data center hyperconverged solution at the Edge.
COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and specifically Edge computing projects for many industries. One of the biggest challenges in this ‘new world’ is automating deployment of applications and their supporting infrastructure. CIOs are no longer managing 2-3 data center or cloud locations but hundreds or thousands of Edge locations with a small amount of compute power at each. To further add to the complexity, many of the key Edge use cases, such as quick service retail chains, don’t have the technical skillsets at each site to configure hardware or deploy applications.
The Sunlight Infrastructure Manager (SIM) and Marketplace have been designed to solve this exact problem through automation.
The SIM is a centralised dashboard and API providing a ‘single pane of glass’ onto your entire Edge-to-cloud infrastructure. Enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can securely deploy and manage Sunlight clusters across multiple distributed Edge locations, the cloud, and the data center from a single place. Sites can even continue to operate in a disconnected mode when subject to intermittent network connections. Other SIM features include a disaster recovery portal to migrate workloads from one cluster to another, role-based access control, and the central storage of workload backups.
The Sunlight Marketplace allows Enterprises and MSPs to automate the deployment of applications across Edge locations with a single click. The Marketplace contains ‘recipes’ for deploying many common applications out-of-the-box, and other applications can be added using an Ansible-based framework. Both virtual machine-based and cloud-native applications are supported. This significantly cuts the time and cost of deploying and updating applications across a large Edge infrastructure.
Sunlight founder and CEO, Julian Chesterfield said, “Cloud has made it really easy to deploy infrastructure and applications in just a few clicks. However, until now, edge deployments have been horrendously complex. Our new SIM combined with our ultra-thin Edge hyperconverged infrastructure platform – NexVisor – and commodity Edge hardware, makes it possible to deliver edge applications with the simplicity we’re used to in the cloud – making SaaS models possible at the edge.”
“The Sunlight Infrastructure Manager and Marketplace allows for automated deployments of the Altos BrainSphere server range to Data Centers and distributed Edge locations,” said Jackie Lee, President at Altos Computing, an Acer company. “Our partners and customers are finding the management of these disparate locations, from Edge to core to cloud, seamless and simple.”
Sunlight NexVisor and SIM are available as a bundle from $120 per month per Edge node and can be deployed in a Highly Available mode on just two nodes.