Welcome to the Internet of Things, where your “smart” clothes, digital devices, superfast computer, and even your house and car will all be connected and talking to one another.
It wasn’t quite a 2001 moment, where a murderous but unfailingly polite computer visits death and destruction on a deep-space crew. But for Digital Fortress—one of hundreds of thousands of data centers around the world responsible for the safety of the exabytes of email, industrial data, software-as-service applications, websites, and other data sources that are the lifeblood of the digital economy—the consequences could have been disastrous.
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“Ten minutes is the difference between things being okay and having fried servers,” says former Digital Fortress IT manager Scott Gamble, who was in charge when things started to go south.
Fortunately for Digital Fortress and its customers, Gamble led the installation of an Internet-connected sensor network in the data center just days before. Those sensors alerted Gamble and his team that temperatures were on the rise inside the data center, no matter what the CRAC unit said. Forewarned, they were able to send engineers in to corral the rogue machine before it could do any real harm.
Welcome to the world of the digital nexus, where anything and everything is connected to the Internet, or will be any day now.
The Next Big Things
The next big thing in tech is not just one thing—it’s billions of them. In a report released in February, analyst Jim Tully at Gartner Inc., an IT research firm, estimated that 4.9 billion objects are now online as part of the Internet of Things, or IoT. He expects that number to balloon to 25 billion by 2020. That’s because manufactured goods, freight, cars and trucks, energy, and systems of all kinds are either safer, more efficient, less costly, or all of the above when they’re Internet-connected than when they’re off the digital grid.
John Shoemaker, executive VP at Identec Solutions—a company that installs connected sensor networks—says operating an IoT-enabled business makes it less like driving a train and more “like flying an airplane—I can course-correct in real time.”
In other words, IoT technology gives businesses the ability to manage goods and services—whether getting a handle on potential problems before they turn into disasters or managing inventory or moving goods from one continent to another. As time goes on, it will also increasingly impact people in their homes and private lives.
The Connected Home
The Nest thermostat and Protect smoke alarm, bought by Google from a crowd-financed startup for $3.2 billion just last year, are just two of the many products now on the market that let homeowners remotely manage and monitor the environment of their homes. Devices for fire and home-invasion detection can be set and monitored remotely, capable of texting alerts and articulating alarms in plain English.
Smart looking as well as just plain smart, Nest products are among the first connected appliances to gain traction in the consumer marketplace, thanks in part to their easy-to-use interface and attractive appearance. But just about every household appliance is a candidate for upgraded utility and cache as they become connected devices.
Take washing machines, for example: As envisioned by chip maker NXP Semiconductors, you’ll soon be able to program wash, spin, and rinse cycles; water temperature; and fabric handling on your smartphone. If something goes wrong while you’re at the office, you’ll be able to call up maintenance and system-status information and summon service professionals—and someday even send a self-driving car to pick them up!
Connected Cars and Drones
It’s no coincidence that self-driving cars and drones coincide with the IoT explosion. Both will depend on their Internet connections.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies are now in development by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and other future technologies might soon allow cars to exchange “Here I Am” signals with traffic lights as well as with one another for accident avoidance. With more than 30,000 traffic fatalities each year on U.S. highways, the incentive to make driving safer is enormous, and V2V communication promises to be at least part of the solution.
Drones will depend on V2V as well. Final flight protocols allowing for the widespread commercial use of drones (such as the delivery service envisioned by Amazon) can be vastly simplified by enabling virtual skyways with V2V and IoT technology, allowing drones to report their positions, trajectories, and flight plans to one another as well as to air traffic control.
With the market for drones expected to reach $12 billion by 2024, the race is already on to build the connected drone traffic control system. Competitors in that space range from NASA’s Ames Research Center and major defense contractor Exelis to a 12-person startup out of Portland, Ore., called Skyward.
The Future of the Machine
All of the billions of new objects utilizing interconnectivity with the Internet will greatly accelerate the already tsunami-like influx of data, threatening what has been humorously called “data-geddon.” But the problem isn’t frivolous, and it’s being addressed with some urgency.
Today, most computers work by loading data from hard disks into much faster working memory, called DRAM. Allowing fast memory to be served by slow storage was sufficient when there was less data to work with, but as tasks call on increasing quantities of information, computers are becoming overloaded.
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HP Labs is not the only shop working on this problem, but it is doing some of the most interesting work. HP’s vision is of an entirely new kind of computer—they’re calling it “The Machine”—that incorporates several major innovations: a new combination of memory and storage on nanoscale “memristors”; data transfer by light, rather than by copper wires, through “silicon photonics”; and a new operating system built for the superfast exchange between memory and storage.
Whether it’s HP’s Machine or another iteration, computers built to handle vastly greater quantities of data might not need data centers at all. Experts in future-tech believe the devices in our briefcases and pockets, as well as the ones on our desks, will eventually become nodes on a distributed computing network that would put computing tasks closer to where their results are needed. In that case, devices that now store data in the cloud would become the cloud.
“THE NEXT BIG THING IN TECH IS NOT JUST ONE THING - IT'S BILLIONS OF THEM... 9 BILLION OBJECTS ARE NOW ONLINE AS PART OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS, OR IOT. HE EXPECTS THAT NUMBER TO BALLOON TO 25 BILLION BY 2020.”
You could think of this new vision as IoT 2.0, but IoT 1.0 still has a way to go. Gartner’s Jim Tully cites security concerns as the number-one factor standing in the way, with privacy running a close second. So far, though, IoT purveyors don’t seem all that concerned about security. “Surprisingly,” as Tully puts it in his report for Gartner, “given the prominence of security concerns, at present, vendors do not view or embrace strong security as a market differentiator.”
Sooner rather than later, however, both public and corporate customers will demand a solution to this problem.
How do the Internet of Things, big data and the future of computing collide into one vision for technology? Two words: The Machine. Learn how The Machine will advance four emergent technologies in parallel to prevent the rising data flow from flooding conventional IT systems and to disrupt the way we think about computing.
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