Bringing Data Center Management Features to the Edge

NVIDIA Fleet Command announced new features giving IT administrators more advanced controls and protection for edge environments.

Unlike traditional data centers with hundreds of servers in a single location, edge deployments have one or two servers in thousands of locations. Traditional IT management tools struggle to meet the needs of these distributed environments, especially when it comes to AI.

Fleet Command is purpose-built for managing edge AI environments offering a simple, managed platform for container orchestration. This makes it easy to provision and deploy AI applications and systems in thousands of distributed environments securely from a single cloud-based console.

Video 1. Administrators of any skill level can deploy AI across their edge infrastructure in minutes

With more robust options and tools for managing edge environments, Fleet Command now offers advanced features including high availability of edge clusters, advanced storage customization, secure app communication tunneling, and zero downtime management updates.

High availability for edge clusters

Edge AI is used to run important, often mission-critical functions in edge environments. From patient monitoring to industrial inspection, an application outage could significantly hamper operations. Many organizations are looking to add redundancy to their edge environments, with multiple servers running per edge location.

Fleet Command now offers high availability at edge locations with three or more systems, ensuring that a hardware outage doesn’t take out mission-critical applications. With its cloud-native architecture, systems managed by Fleet Command can operate as both controllers and worker nodes. If one goes down, another can be promoted in its place. Now IT teams can reduce downtime and have more confidence in their edge AI architecture.

Advanced storage customization

AI thrives on data, which is why the edge is often where AI applications are deployed. With streaming data coming from sensors in and around these edge environments, storage is a critical consideration for edge systems.

Advanced storage options in Fleet Command enable IT teams to configure and optimize edge environments for performance and economics. Storage partitions for OS, logs, applications, and more can be customized for each system based on the needs of the applications. With correct storage configurations, organizations can rightsize their deployment and don’t have to worry about runaway processes impacting an edge system.

Secure tunneling

Edge environments have unique requirements and restrictions. This includes firewalls at remote sites that can prevent access to systems for troubleshooting, configuration updates, and other operational tasks. Organizations either need to develop air-gapped solutions with manual processes or look for alternative ways to connect to these solutions remotely.

Fleet Command offers secure tunneling enabling organizations to do remote tasks using the secure communication channels established between the cloud and edge systems. Rather than providing unsecure open network access to the edge systems or applications, Fleet Command provides secure tunneling with dynamic certificate-based authentication and authorization. Remote access is available through a browser and command-line interface based on user preference.

Zero downtime management updates

Management solutions require numerous updates; from new releases and bug fixes to critical security updates. Typically these updates have to be scheduled with maintenance windows and planned downtime.

As a cloud service, the Fleet Command management platform is regularly updated to add new features, improve performance, and maintain security, without impacting access for users. In the last year alone, the Fleet Command console had hundreds of updates handled by the NVIDIA team. With zero downtime, organizations can focus on managing their edge systems without worrying about maintaining their edge management service.

Advancing edge management with Fleet Command

Edge computing is complicated, with unique requirements for management, security, and scale.

Video 2. Managing and scaling AI deployments at the edge

Fleet Command simplifies the edge management for IT teams, bringing advanced enterprise features as a fully managed cloud service.

NVIDIA LaunchPad provides immediate, short-term access to a Fleet Command instance to deploy and monitor real applications on real servers easily. From infrastructure provisioning and optimization to application deployment hands-on labs that walk users through the entire process.

To try these features on Fleet Command, check out NVIDIA LaunchPad for free.

By Amanda Saunders/NVDIA