Re: And things go round
Joking about HP aside for a moment, there's a bit of difference in theory and intent.
The intent, basically, is that the edge computing devices only contain transitory data, while all permanent data is still in the cloud.
You want edge computing when there's a firehose of locally generated data, like you've got hundreds of sensors hooked up all over your buildings generating video, temperature, proximity, etc etc. What you're trying to do is avoid having to send every byte of data back to the cloud and only send it the *interesting* data.
Or let's say you're doing facial recognition on that video - sending all the streams of video back to the cloud and having the cloud tag faces is silly. Maybe you'd LIKE to have all the video from all the cameras, but if you don't have the NSA's budget you need to make some tradeoffs. So you'd have local machines which are configured from cloud data then just tell the cloud which people they see and video only for Persons of Interest. Then you keep the streams local for a month before deleting.
This isn't all that different from things we've seen before, but it is different from a local data center in that the local data center is intended to be The Canonical Repository, but now that's the cloud. And if you have a bunch of local data centers that coordinate to be the canonical repository, well that's a cloud.