Understanding the difference between the insights and infrastructure planes in IoT

TechRepublic’s Conner Forrest spoke with Mimi Spier, vice president of Internet of Things business at VMware, who discusses how it’s critical that companies understand the role edge computing plays in infrastructure. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Mimi Spier: The way we like to simplify IOT, because it is so complex, is that you have the insights planes. The insights plane is how you collect the data and do something with it. It’s your applications, it’s your analytics, it’s your machine learning, it’s all the value that you’re gonna get out of the data.

SEE: IT leader’s guide to edge computing (Tech Pro Research)

Infrastructure plane is what you need to ensure that you have a platform that will easily allow you to get data out of a diverse set of devices, and be able to do the compute and processing at the edge. We call that the compute edge.

So right now, lots of companies are busy getting all their applications running in the cloud. But with IOT, and the amount of data that’s gonna be generated at the edges of your business, you actually need to be thinking about compute that’s going to process and do the analytics–machine learning that will be required for real time information at the compute edge. And so that’s part of the infrastructure plain.

And then you need to think of what we call, the device edge. Which is also part of the infrastructure plane. And that is, how are you gonna connect the devices? How are you gonna get the data out? And when do you scale these diverse sets of devices, gateways, sensors, beacons, cameras? All sorts of different devices that will now be connected that have valuable data that’s inside them. This is now compute infrastructure. That needs to be managed, monitored, and secured in order for you to be able to scale out these IOT use cases.

SEE: Research: Big data and IOT – Benefits, drawbacks, usage trends (Tech Pro Research)

So let me summarize. The insight plane: What do you do with the data? How do you get that rich information? How do you achieve those mission critical objectives in your business?

The infrastructure plane is how do you support those use cases and ensure that this new compute, this new networking, this new management that is required at the edges of your business, that you’re ready for and that can scale.

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