Leading Technology Companies Bring Critical Edge Infrastructure to Las Vegas with Vapor IO's INZONE Program, Accelerating Industry 4.0 Applications and Bridging the Digital Divide

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vapor IO, developers of the  Kinetic Grid™ intelligent infrastructure platform, has joined forces with leading Open Grid technology providers to deliver INZONE, a program for bringing critical infrastructure and applications to forward-looking cities and regions, enabling enterprises in those markets to accelerate their digital transformation. The INZONE program is designed to catalyze innovative services and create a virtuous cycle of investment in a defined geography, serving as an economic catalyst for bridging the digital divide and accelerating industry 4.0 transformation.

The city of Las Vegas, Nevada and surrounding Clark County will host the first INZONE, encompassing the Las Vegas Strip and nearby industrial areas. The Las Vegas INZONE will host applications and services designed to benefit manufacturers, retailers, hospitals, hotels, convention centers, casinos, telecom service providers and other nearby businesses, as well as to local governmental entities and schools.

INZONE leverages Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid architecture, which locates neutral-host infrastructure near high-density industrial and retail zones. Enterprises within an INZONE can leverage Open Grid technologies to implement Industry 4.0 solutions—including private 5G, IoT, video analytics, smart retail, and cloud robotics, among others. Vapor IO currently has plans to implement INZONEs in 36 US markets.

"It all comes down to delivering infrastructure within microseconds of the target facilities, then enabling that infrastructure with last mile networks combined with the intelligence of software APIs and real-time telemetry," said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO. "We call this unique combinations of technologies INZONE because it enables Industry 4.0 application within a physical geography without requiring on-premises data centers."

INZONE enables developers to successfully build and release latency-sensitive applications that are housed off-premises but behave as if they are on-premises. This is made possible by Vapor IO's carefully chosen colocation sites and fiber routes that provide low-latency access to nearby industries.

It Takes a Village
INZONE is more than a collection of technologies; it's an economic accelerator, delivered collaboratively by multiple vendors. By virtue of the neutral host, shared-infrastructure model of Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid platform, customers and partners of Vapor IO can quickly deploy their technologies and services without having to build and operate the critical infrastructure. This makes it easier and faster to bring Industry 4.0 products to market while also amortizing infrastructure costs across the multitude of its users.

The following companies are providing technologies and participating in the first INZONE in Las Vegas:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Outposts (a service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience) as part of the INZONE testbed environment in Las Vegas, making it possible to run AWS workloads as if they were on-premises.
• Guavus (a Thales company) will provide its SQLstream real-time analytics technology to drive 5G telco, Industry 4.0 and other vertical industry use cases — enabling distributed data collection, AI-based analytics deployed at the network edge , and low-code/no-code dashboards for customer ease of use.
• Hivelocity will provide bare metal provisioning and private cloud services atop ITRenew servers, making it easy for enterprise customers to provision and manage servers on a pay-as-you-go basis.
• ITRenew will provide hyperscale-grade, bare metal rack solutions in INZONE environments, delivering breakthrough TCO and sustainability, while enabling enterprises in a near-prem environment to leverage the same best-in-class hardware used by the world's largest cloud companies.
• Lenovo will provide edge servers designed specifically for edge environments and use cases. These edge servers offer VMware's vSphere, vSAN and Tanzu Kubernetes platform in a small, secure and ruggedized form factor.
• Terbine will provide edge-based handling of IoT data moving between vehicles, devices and various end systems. Terbine's IoT Data Exchange Platform will run on servers close to where data is acquired and consumed, supporting advanced applications in augmented reality, autonomous vehicle guidance, city-scale digital twins, localized traffic management, public safety and security.
• Terranet Communications will provide last mile wireless for digital divide initiatives such as remote learning as well as for a variety of smart city applications.
• VMware will provide its Telco Cloud Platform in support of 5G connectivity and its Multi-Cloud Services Grid for hypercomposition of edge-native applications spanning the user to core edge continuum.

Economic Impact
The first INZONE being deployed in Las Vegas, Nevada will be served initially from two sites, spanning both the city of Las Vegas as well as areas in surrounding Clark County, including the Las Vegas strip. As detailed in Tolaga Research's Total Economic Impact of INZONE to Las Vegasand Surrounding Clark County, the INZONE program is expected to contribute $115.8 Billion in total economic impact over the next 10 years.

"Vapor IO's INZONE program will bring infrastructure and solutions to the city of Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County that will diversify the tax base and increase the region's competitiveness on the world stage," said Phil Marshall, Chief Researcher, Tolaga Research.  "By supporting the deployment of INZONE and its partner ecosystem, Las Vegas businesses will have a fast path to Industry 4.0 automation and competitiveness. Industries from tourism to healthcare to manufacturing will now have the ability to use cloud economics and shared infrastructure to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying next-generation applications."

Bridging the Digital Divide
A key aspect of the INZONE program includes building partnerships with city and county agencies as well as local NGOs to develop public-private partnerships to implement programs to help bridge the digital divide in Las Vegas. The city of Las Vegas already has an active program to deliver 5G private networking capabilities to the underserved and the INZONE program can provide a cost-effective means for expanding this program and helping the city and county attract federal infrastructure spending.

The First Commercial Implementation of an Open Grid Architecture
The Las Vegas INZONE is based upon principles advanced by the Open Grid Alliance (OGA). The OGA was launched in May 2021 to accelerate the creation of Open Grid infrastructure by providing a neutral platform in which member companies can co-create commercially viable technology integrations that extend today's Internet to enable next-generation applications that include cloud robotics, autonomous drones, real-time video inferencing, and augmented and virtual reality applications.

Supporting Resources

• INZONE web page
• Getting Real with Industry 4.0 and INZONE in Las Vegas (blog post)
• Total Economic Impact of INZONE to the City of Las Vegasand Surrounding Clark County (research paper)
• INZONE Las Vegas Coverage Map — Phase I (image)

About Vapor IO
Vapor IO is developing the largest nationwide edge-to-edge networking, colocation and interconnection platform capable of supporting the most demanding low-latency workloads at the edge of the wireless and wireline access networks. The company's Kinetic Grid™ platform combines multi-tenant colocation with software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking. The company's technologies deliver the most flexible, highly-distributed edge infrastructure at the edge of the wireless network. Vapor IO has deployed its Kinetic Edge® services in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, and is actively deploying in 36 additional markets. Follow @VaporIO on Twitter.

Vapor, Kinetic Edge, Kinetic Grid and INZONE are registered trademarks or trademarks of Vapor IO, Inc. VMware, Telco Cloud Platform and Multi-Cloud Services Grid are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

What People are Saying about INZONE Las Vegas 

Alphabetically, by company name

"Our Guavus SQLstream technology is powering the 4G/5G edge – providing sophisticated AI/ML-based real-time streaming and predictive analytics for IIoT and leading companies across telecommunications, smart cities, aviation, transportation, and other key vertical industries.  We’re excited to be working with this world-class group of partners to help the City of Las Vegas, and innovators like them, to use AI and analytics to deliver a great digital experience to their community and customers.” 

— Alex Shevchenko, CEO at Guavus (a Thales company).

“The ability to provision bare metal servers from Vapor IO’s INZONE could be game-changing for Industry 4.0 workloads. Now enterprises can scale their need for on-premises compute, but take advantage of Hivelocity's ability to offer the pay-as-you-go cloud economics. We’re excited to collaborate with Vapor IO, and our other key partner ITRenew, to deliver a bare metal service option to INZONE customers.”

 — Richard B. Nicholas, SVP Corporate Development, Hivelocity

“We see massive opportunities for innovation at the edge. Vegas is just the beginning and the INZONE program is a critical accelerator. The explosion of infrastructure needed to unlock trillions of dollars of economic growth potential demands new easy-to-deploy business models and industry collaboration. Vapor IO, VMware, ITRenew and the members of the Open Grid Alliance are enabling the scale, cost-effectiveness, breakthrough performance and sustainability that is the new global, collective imperative.” 

               — Ali Fenn, President of ITRenew

"Lenovo provides solutions that span the entire core-to-edge continuum, from data center cloud deployments all the way to edge sites. We look forward to being part of the INZONE solution in Las Vegas, as it provides an innovative platform for Industry 4.0 applications. We’re confident that Lenovo hardware combined with Vapor IO’s INZONE will drive accelerated time to value for customers implementing Industry 4.0 solutions.” 

— Charles Ferland, Vice President & General Manager Edge Computing & Communication Service Providers

“Infrastructure programs like Vapor IO’s INZONE are crucial to lowering the cost and complexity of collecting and analyzing IoT data at a city or county scale. By leveraging INZONE to distribute our IoT Data Exchange Platform throughout the Las Vegas region, we’ll be able to place servers close the points of data acquisition and consumption. This new capability will allow us to support advanced applications such as augmented reality, autonomous vehicle guidance, city-scale digital twins, localized traffic management, public safety and security.”

— David Knight, CEO, Terbine

“Terranet recently deployed a 5G-ready network as foundation for Las Vegas’ four-part plan to transform into a smart city with democratized access to broad connectivity. We’re proud to be helping to close the digital divide for Las Vegas citizens and we see Vapor IO’s INZONE as a way to reach more of the city, more quickly, as well as open up new Industry 4.0 services and capabilities for the city and its growing base of innovative enterprises.”

  — Bart van Aardenne, CEO and co-founder of Terranet Communications 

“Vapor IO’s INZONE program will bring infrastructure and solutions to the city of Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County that will diversify the tax base and increase the region’s competitiveness on the world stage. By supporting the deployment of INZONE and its partner ecosystem, Las Vegas businesses will have a fast path to Industry 4.0 automation and competitiveness. Industries from tourism to healthcare to manufacturing will now have the ability to use cloud economics and shared infrastructure to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying next-generation applications.”

               — Phil Marshall, Chief Researcher, Tolaga Research.

“It all comes down to delivering infrastructure within microseconds of the target facilities, then enabling that infrastructure with last mile networks combined with the intelligence of software APIs and real-time telemetry. We call this unique combination of technologies INZONE because it enables Industry 4.0 application within a physical geography without requiring on-premises data centers.”

               — Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO

“A new workload – edge-native apps – is emerging. Designed to run at the edge, these next-generation apps will transform both consumer experiences and industrial practices. To unlock the potential of these apps, we must establish an infrastructure that can deliver critical networking, security and compute services to the edge. The INZONE program is turning the theoretical to tangible as we build out this infrastructure in Las Vegas and beyond.”

               — Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of distributed edge at VMware. 

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SOURCE Vapor IO