IT & Network Infrastructure: IBM's Watson, Your Car and The Future of Computing

"Software as a Service." "Cloud computing." "Virtualization." By now we're probably all-too familiar with the terms of the day. But with regards to converging IT technologies - routers, switches, media gateways, media servers, etc - as we ride this technology wave we can sometimes we can miss the forest for the trees. The reality is, technological miracles are happening every hour of every day. Tonight, we'll see the latest entry: IBM's Watson Supercomputer will take on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in "a landmark test of artificial intelligence."

Yup, that's right. 2 of the word's Jeopardy champs will be taking on a computer. This is an encore to the match in 1997, when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated chess world champion Gary Kasparoff. One of my theories is that these days, most of us are so used to seeing technology perform miracles that we're pretty jaded. When something amazing comes along, sometimes it's hard to spot because the reality is, if you live in New York, Tokyo or London, you're surrounded by The Amazing every single day. If you have any doubts, think about the technology it takes to build and operate a single passenger airplane. Not only that, but the average new high-end car has more lines of code than an advanced jet fighter. That's amazing. Consider this tidbit courtesy of Robert Charrotte, IEEE Spectrum Magazine:

"The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

... yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, ”it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code,” says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars..."

Wow. All that power. But whether in Watson, the plane you fly on, the car sitting in your driveway, or the network you operate - all can be for naught without best-in-class network software. Obviously, when it comes to network infrastructure management I am biased towards our own network management software: Redcell. But whatever solution you are looking at, the software should able to do the following:

Change/Compliance Management

• Quickly detect changes to the IT environment through event-driven or proactive

change monitoring

• Event-based configuration change detection via SNMP trap, Syslog

• Policy-based compliance detection via Redcell ProScan™ – pro-active configuration file scanning

• Provide comprehensive reporting of Configuration Changes – meaningful reports on what

changed, who made the change, when the change was made and authorization status

Firmware/OS Management & Deployment

• Deploy systems or firmware upgrades to devices, or groups of devices

• Schedule or immediately backup and restore OS/FW versions

• Troubleshoot with comparison features

Configuration File Management

• A template-based configuration file creation, back-up and restoration on a scheduled or

immediate basis

• Visual, color-coded configuration file comparison features to quickly identify changes

User Interface (UI) Configuration

• Have real-time or discrete configuration management for things like system, routing protocols,

ports and VLAN configurations

Group Management

• Flexibility to create static or dynamic groups to manage one-to-many management actions

100% Agentless Architecture to Reduce TCO

• Quickest time to value – Deploy in days not months

• Remove any requirement to take a production server offline in order to update its agent

• Eradicate the wasted time of tuning agents

• Eliminate the possibility that an unstable agent could cause downtime and loss of business

Please visit the Dorado Software website to learn more about Redcell.