psilva's prophecies: January 2015

Friday, January 30, 2015

VMware Partner Exchange 2015: Video Preview

I offer a preview of VMware PEX2015 in San Francisco along with some of the videos that are planned for next week. Call this a PEX Promo!

F5 YouTube Channel

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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Will Deflate-Gate Lead to Micro-Chipped Footballs?

Last summer I wrote about the some of the cool technology that the NFL was going to use during the 2014/15 season. There were sensors in the player's shoulder pads tracking all their on field movements. It measured player acceleration rates, top speed, length of runs, and even the distance between a ball carrier and a defender. Next year they'll add sensors for breathing, temperature and heart rate. More stats than ever and could change the game for-ever. The yardsticks had chips along with the refs and all that data was picked up by 20 RFID receivers placed throughout various stadiums. Those, in turn, were wired to a hub and server which processed the data. 25 times a second, data was transmitted to the receivers and that then went to the NFL 'cloud' and available in seconds.

The only thing without a sensor was the football. Will that change now due to Deflate-Gate?

No doubt if you are a NFL fan (or maybe not since it has dominated the news) you have heard of Deflate-gate. Apparently during the AFC Championship game, the New England Patriots' footballs were under inflated during the first half. With a pound of pressure missing, those footballs were slightly easier to grip and, in theory, supposedly gave New England an advantage. If not an advantage, just the simple fact that they were not inflated to the proper pressure per the rules. Personally, I really don't care as I'm a Miami Dolphins fan and anyone else in the AFC East (Jets, Bills, Patriots) can kiss my KISS tattoo. Deflate-gate has gotten so blown up that even science folks like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Neil deGrasse Tyson has gotten into the mix and of course, there is a SNL skit about it.

But it got me thinking. If they had sensors or chips in/on the footballs, none of this would have occurred. The sensors would have alerted the officials that certain footballs were not at regulation air pressure - just like your car tires do with that dashboard indicator. If, somehow, the sensors didn't go off, they could have played back the football's GPS and movements leading up to the kickoff and this whole case would have been solved by the end of halftime. Imagine the replay booth, instead of showing the first half highlights, would be showing a layout of the stadium along with 24 little dots making their move from the locker room to the officials to the field and everything in between. I would bet that most of those All-Access passes people hang around their necks have some sort of chip that provides authenticity, you could add 'location' and then see all the people dots mingling with the football dots....and voila, who was near the equipment when this happened. As part of their internal investigation, the Patriots apparently re-created their entire pre-game routine to absolve themselves from any wrongdoing. Maybe next year they'll just pull up the 'Where's my Football' app during the post game press conference - 'See! My dot is here and the football dot is over there...I did nothing.'

Go Hawks!

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Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers

Reliable access to mission-critical applications is a key success factor for enterprises. For many organizations, moving applications from physical data centers to the cloud can increase resource capacity and ensure availability while reducing system management and IT infrastructure costs. Achieving this hybrid data center model the right way requires healthy resource pools and the means to distribute them. The F5 Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers solution provides core load-balancing, DNS and acceleration services that result in non-disruptive, seamless migration between private and public cloud environments.

Check out the new Reference Architecture today along with a new video below!

Technorati Tags: hybrid,data center,cloud,application delivery,office 365,goldengate,reference_architecture,f5,big-ip,silva

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Monday, January 12, 2015

The Analog Generation

From Baby Boomers to Gen X, Y, & Z, there are certain characteristics that define, at least according to demographers and historians, each generation. Generation X, specifically, might also remember a Rush song called The Analog Kid. While not as frequently played as Tom Sawyer or Subdivisions, it has always been my favorite Rush song. Driving bass, awesome guitar solo, amazing imagery and Peart.

I am that Generation. The Analog Generation.

With all of our digital things getting connected, including things on and in our body, I started thinking that I'm part of the generation that transitioned from analog to digital. Not that analog or analog signals are disappearing anytime soon, but as a kid, there were way more analog things than digital, that's for sure. Audiophiles will also argue that analog recordings are better at capturing the true representation of sound due to it being continuous, rather than specific values to represent sound, as in the discrete digital.

I wondered if I was the only one who figured this out - highly doubtful - so I searched. And actually, there are a few people who have made the connection. One who argues that today's kids, at least his kids, are very analog. They love playing outside, playing board games and other non-digital activities. He talks about the importance of parents giving their children attention in the real world. And the other one specifically talks about the analog things we remember as a kid - records, 8mm, rotary phones, black & white TV, VHS and others verses the CDs, DVDs, iPhones and HD TVs today's kids live with.

Some feel that Rush's The Analog Kid is about a more innocent time with less technology in the world, longing for the simpler days. A cautionary tale. One person notes, 'Perhaps Peart's social comment with the two songs is how technology and science creates incredible wonders, but there's a cruel price to pay if there's no heart to guide it.' The other song he references is Digital Man, also on the Signals album. When I hear The Analog Kid it immediately takes me back to 1982 and whatever I was doing in high school. It is interesting that I took my first computer class in high school around that time...while still learning how to type...on a real typewriter. If you remember those, with the little IBM ball to change fonts, you're analog.

The last lines of the song are:

Too many hands on my time
Too many feelings
Too many things on my mind

When I leave I don't know
What I'm hoping to find
When I leave I don't know
What I'm leaving behind...

We are certainly entering a new realm with IoT with a lot of hopes, dreams and ideas of things to come. And while they all might help us automatically adjust home temperatures, become a little healthier, auto drive our car, keep an eye on our home, and cook better dinners, we can't forget that humans are social creatures, not necessarily social media darlings, and our real family, friends and loves are what really matter.

We're already forging a new frontier but we must tread carefully.

Technorati Tags: f5,analog,digital,rush,music,the analog kid,iot,things,sensors,humans,society,generations,silva

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Tuesday, January 6, 2015

OK 2015, Now What?

Once again after a couple weeks off and the calendar odometer flipping another year, I'm sitting here with a blinking curser wondering what to write about. And the thing that pops into my head are Things. The Everythings. While 2014 was the hype year for the Internet of Things (IoT), according to many 2015 will be the year that IoT...and really the Internet of Everything, becomes mainstream. It is occurring this week at CES where tons of smart cars, smart kitchens, smart watches, smart televisions, smart wearables, smart appliances, smart healthcare devices, smart robots, smart belts and anything else that has a sensor, a chip and is connected to the internet will be on display. I wonder if terms like smart aleck and smarty pants might soon be in vogue.

While the Hover skateboard originally slated for 2015 is still in the works, there is a massive amount of info related to Things and how they are going to change society, change how we live and change us, as people.

Business Insider has a fascinating slide deck showing the most important ways the Internet of Everything market will develop, the benefits newly connected devices will offer consumers and businesses, and the potential barriers that could inhibit growth. IoT will be the largest device market, by far, and will soon be larger than the PC, tablet, and smartphone markets combined. The software to run IoT along with systems to make sense of all that data will be huge. Areas like enhanced customer service and improved use of field assets have already been realized by early adaptors. Moving forward, new business models will blossom and services will become more important than simple products. How they all work together will be key.

IoT is not without it's challenges. Threats to data security, physical security, the security of devices, regulations, privacy, encryption, authentication and a host of other issues all need to be addressed before this can really take off. Anyone remember the Cloud a couple years ago? Themes are the same. While consumer devices seem to be the focus today, businesses will benefit with greater operational efficiency along with helping them manage plants, property and equipment.

Trend Micro also has a good IoE 101 article with 5 easy steps to explain IoT and IoE to folks. Over on LinkedIn, Jeremy Geelan has put together a great list of the many various, although not exhaustive, IoT events for 2015. He's revised it once already and just might again as more arrive. Over on Computer Business Review, they have their Top 6 Wearable Predictions for 2015 and Gartner is predicting that by 2017, 30% of the wearables will be invisible to the human eye.

No matter what, all these things will need a robust, scalable and intelligent infrastructure to handle the massive traffic growth. If you thought our mobile phones & tablets generated a lot of traffic, our Things will be a multitude of what mobile contributed. Get ready now...

Technorati Tags: 2015,iot,things,sensors,ces,f5,infrastructure,security,silva,wearables

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