ESG Validates Sunlight.io as Edge Infrastructure Innovator

Sunlight.io announced availability of a new Technical Validation report by independent analysts ESG Group, which recognizes Sunlight’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack for its tiny but powerful footprint, performance, and ease of management – perfect for resource-constrained Edge applications.

Enterprises are very familiar with the simplicity and cost saving benefits of deploying hyperconverged infrastructure in their data centers, making it a top 3 data center modernisation initiative in 2021. Yet, they are unable to get the same benefits for their constrained edge infrastructure, as regular hyperconverged stacks are too bloated and slow to use.

Sunlight changes all that, bringing thin, fast, and simple hyperconvergence to the edge on Intel and Arm. The report validates that Sunlight is 81% more CPU efficient and 98% more RAM efficient than two of the industry leading data center HCI solutions. In constrained edge environments – such as factory floors, hospital wards, and retail stores, where power and space are at a premium, this means edge infrastructure is kept small, and costs are kept at a minimum.

“The increased efficiency of the Sunlight HCI stack not only reduces hardware costs, it also reduces power, space, and cooling requirements. This is especially valuable for data-intensive workloads that are being deployed at the edge of the network (e.g., IoT sensors), where space and power are often in short supply,” said Alex Arcilla, Senior Validation Analyst at ESG Group.

ESG was also able to show that Sunlight allows demanding AI, Big Data, and analytics applications to access near 100% of the performance of the underlying hardware, delivering the same or better storage performance (IOPS) as the manufacturer’s ratings for a fast Intel Optane NVMe drive. When running a MariaDB workload on like-for-like hardware in AWS, they found a 12x speed-up in query performance, and a latency improvement of up to 92%, over AWS’s native virtualization stack. For video analytics and AI applications such as factory automation and crowd analysis that require instant local results, delivering this level of performance in a small form factor is essential.

“ESG believes that Sunlight offers the innovation that organizations need to ultimately maximize the value extracted by the volume of data they are collecting. If you seek to maximize the performance of data-intensive workloads, particularly in edge networks, without the burden of the typical virtualization overhead, we strongly urge you to take a closer look at Sunlight,” said Alex Arcilla in the report.

“Edge is a very different beast to a data center environment – and it needs a new approach to infrastructure,” said Julian Chesterfield, Sunlight founder and CEO. “We’ve rearchitected the hyperconverged stack for the Edge to make it possible to deploy and manage demanding applications with ease across hundreds of sites. ESG’s validation proves that it is possible to build a highly resilient and performant edge infrastructure at low cost.”

Download the full report here.