Skip to main content

Infrastructure Management for Internet of Things

These are tumultuous times, impending wars, fewer jobs, failing banks and slower economic growth.

We need good leadership for security, a proper natural resource utilization to save our planet and build hope for a better tomorrow.

I am finding leadership and hope in oddest of places...in our tech sector. We are buzzing with activity in Social networking, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Technologies.

In some ways all these trends are having a synergistic effect to promote rapid development and consequent  adoption of Internet of Things(IoT).

We are seeing massive acquisitions(NEST by Google/Beats by Apple) of IoT potentials, Crowd funding and rapid improvement in energy technologies(solar/battery).   These are fueling the progress of internet of things as the next big thing.

Impact of Internet of Things(IoT) will be direct and transformative for both communities and corporations.

Some examples of Mundane Tasks that can be made simple with application of IoT:

1. Active Asset Tracking - Where Assets are advertising their locations and metadata - need for gate passes (returnable and non-returnable) and reconciliation are minimized while achieving loss prevention targets.
2. Fleet Management - Vehicles are reporting their Mileage, Fuel levels and Maintenance records. Increased Car utilization using share corporate/community fleets.
3. Energy Management - LPG Cylinder - advertises usage and alarms us if there is fire hazard.
4. Energy Management - HVAC and Lighting - People aware comfort setting on conditioners and  activity inspired lighting patterns
5. Mobile Cashless world - buying and selling happens over cell phones using NFC.

The use cases above rally around the preservations of precious natural resources(energy,water and air), Improving Security/Safety and creating delightful experiences for our future generations.

Internet of Things(IoT) is driven by the inexpensive intelligent purpose-built embedded connected devices that work together as a system.

The Role of these devices vary from being  Data Collectors(Sensors), Display devices, Decision makers and Execution engines(End-effectors).

The key to building a Robust, Secure and Scalable Information Infrastructure lies in the decentralizing the above functions.

A Proposed Architecture blueprint for easier management, quicker and more productive adoption could be based on Simple Autonomous, Co-Operative and Segmented Groups of devices with no central control.

The idea is to bring datacenter as close as possible to the device. A Programmable Infrastructure for Distributed Analytics, Decision making and Local Information Summarization/dissemination can result in:
1.  Efficient utilization of Network connectivity
2.  Distributed Policy Enforcement and Security
3.  Easier Access to rich Information with Robust Identity and Access Management

We are proposing a vision of distributed mobile-data-centers. Each member device acts as a node within a segment/cluster. It is elected to assume one or more roles based on device capability, resource availability and proximity.

The Intent of the System can be codified into easy to understand policies with set constraints. Controls can be build to modify either constraints or policies themselves for driving to intended outcomes.

This distributed approach to Information Infrastructure management may be ideal for simplifying the complex event processing challenges.  It inverts traditional paradigm of device to datacenter.

VAMANiT Mobile Information Infrastructure is our call to action to realize this architectural vision.

We believe in doing our bit to preserve precious natural resources(energy,water and air), Improve Security/Safety and create delightful experiences for our future generations.







Comments

This is really nice and attractive post on Data Innovation.

Thanks
rickybroad
4thought said…
Glad you liked it Rick

Popular posts from this blog

ForeThought -- Global directory service for the Digital world

ForeThought Real world is full of people. We have phone books,yellow pages, maps and postal addresses to get to them. Real world is governed by laws, rules and norms. Digital world is full of devices and devices only(severs, desktops, appliances, gadgets etc..) In the digital world, We have DNS, IP Addresses/SMTP mail address, Routers/gateways. All of these methods are still rudimentery to lookup and locate attributes, features and functions of devices. Most devices serve a useful purpose. some of them are misused to inflict pain and damage in the digital world. Clear knowledge attributes, features and functions of devices can hel in reducing the risk and help us in responding to misuse of these devices. An idea of a Global Directory Service -- for locating Devices worldwide....These devices are attributed to People, Resources and Services.... This type of service can help in Asset tracking, Monitoring, Communications, Incident response, forensics and Da...

Blueprint for a new ITaaS Service Provider

Cloud computing is raising the expectation on the agility, availability and access to sophisticated computing and communication platforms for small and medium business. Today most critical IT components for running a successful business are available as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS platforms. There is little value in recreating all these services from the scratch by a new age service provider. It may be prudent to create a skeletal platform for essential services while taking a position of services broker to organize a rich portfolio by aggregating important services into tightly knit IT-as-a –Service offering. The initial target market for such a service provider is Small and Medium Business. We will review aspirations and capabilities needed to serve the ever increasing expectations of small and medium customers from a modern service provider. The Vision, Strategy and Execution plan to create a modern Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) provider infrastructure is described on the...

RAINing Appliances in the Clouds

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...