* Review: ‘Inescapable Data’
I don’t usually do columns about books – I think this is the first – but I decided to make an exception when I was contacted by Chris Stakutis, one of the authors of “Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence.”
Co-authored with John Webster, the book https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0131852159/fusion0e is a mixture of technological and sociological speculation and insight. It takes the reader through a vision of pervasive information and what it means to different industries (for example, retail, manufacturing, entertainment and the military), through a mix of enabling technologies – from wireless, to advances in storage, to supercomputing, to new forms of visualization and intelligent networking.
The “convergence” discussed in the book is not simply about voice, video and data, but also about a steady surge of information in various forms, accessible across multiple access points, and how it will likely affect (and to a significant degree already is affecting) the way we live and work. The vision in the book is one of pervasive access to increasingly information-rich applications for both entertainment and work – whether this means more versatile interaction with Web sites, holographic applications for industrial designers, simple glowing orbs to let us know when a bus is likely to arrive, or indicators for whether a temperature threshold is likely to be exceeded in an industrial environment.
My personal favorite was “motes,” or “miniaturized thumb-sized computers attached to radio transceivers, powered by batteries or solar cells.” Motes can actually be so tiny that they can be sprinkled across a wall surface in “smart paint.” These can “self-organize” into “mini computer societies.” Requiring minimal power and virtually no real maintenance, this would mean you could walk into a room where the paint on the walls would be literally “listening” to detect, say, security-threatening behavior, or maybe to identify you and trigger a communication so that the building you were entering would welcome you as an honored guest. It’s easy to imagine the military and security value of such computer designs.
Manipulation and interactivity for entertainment and work are also part of this vision. And of course this will bring risks in terms of privacy, distraction and disruption, and – surprise! – a drastic need to enhance the consistency and performance of increasingly complex applications over increasingly diverse and expanding networked systems.
From a network and application management perspective, one of the most interesting sections is entitled “Intelligent Networking” and references work done by Cheng Wu, founder of Acopia Networks. The book presents a vision where the core intelligence for applications moves into the network, so that the user’s view of the application and the network’s view of the application largely coincide. The benefit of this would be that huge performance advantages could be achieved as the network sorts through application and user priorities in real time. XML encapsulation is seen to be the best answer here. Although nowhere in the book are service-oriented architecture and Web services mentioned, the potential advantages of this design point in a modularized application environment become even more enormous.
Since the notion that the network is, or should be, a utility in an absolute sense has always troubled me, I found this vision particularly attractive. Taking the hackneyed analogy of the network to a utility train transport, this would be the equivalent of a train system that would transport each passenger knowing the urgency with which they had to arrive, their seating preferences, what type of traveling companion they would find most entertaining, their eating preferences, their work requirements during the trip and their entertainment needs during the trip – and of course any medical issues or the possible fact that what they really need to do is sleep. It would then create a magic kingdom in which each passenger virtually inhabited their perfect “traveling” world.
While there is little in “Inescapable Data” that’s purely targeted at network and systems management, I found that the book was enormously stimulating in framing what the future might hold for the management of application services across a wide variety of networked transports. It also had a solid section with direct implications for storage management and storage performance. The book is written for an executive-level reader interested in technology and its effects, so it doesn’t require a background in engineering or even computer science to follow it.
