Making sense of sensor networks
Sensor Networks are Coming of Age
Sensor networks have been with us for years, but the combination of ubiquitous wireless networks, higher bandwidth, cheap storage, improved battery life and solar power are driving more and more applications towards data collection using sensors of one kind or another. These systems get very complex very quickly. Just consider:
- The sensors are usually distributed and heterogeneous
- Aggregate sensor data production rates are sky high (number of sensors times sample rate per sensor) particularly when combined with images and video
- The sensors can be fixed or mobile
- The people applications interested in the meaning of the sensor data can be fixed or mobile
- What is deemed important within the sensor data is fluid and constantly changing
How do you make sense of a massive stream of information, distributed across a large geography where the relationships between sensors and their surroundings can literally be changing minute to minute?
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Working on basic sharing skills
In a blog post this week, Lori MacVittie talks about, among other things, the reluctance of different groups towards sharing infrastructure. From her post:
Some pieces of infrastructure – particularly those that are part of the network – are so critical (and so very underappreciated) – that they simply cannot be exposed to the kind of risk that comes from “sharing” resources in any model.
I can’t say her never ever kind of experience matches with what we have seen with hardware middleware. When it comes to sharing, our customers fall into two main camps:
- Those that re-buy gear for each major business unit because of concerns over traffic from one interfering with another. This is how they have always deployed software, and they’re not ready to do it differently in hardware. It has more to do with CYA than technology, which is consistent with Lori’s point.
- Those that are blending market data for many asset classes (across departments), and/or a combination of market data, order routing and risk management in the same infrastructure. Generally the motivation is reducing costs, but it can also reduce risks when the shared environment is both faster and more stable than the standalone software it replaces.
When people start to think of hardware middleware infrastructure as similar to their IP network infrastructure (which they almost always share across divisions and applications), many of the walls put up during the software era come down pretty quickly. The biggest reason people hesitate to share is, as Lori points out, fear of figuring out what happened when there is a problem or outage. The reality is that hardware infrastructure provides more visibility, not less, since stats tracking and logging are done in parallel without impacting performance. This level of visibility (which they are NOT getting in software) is key to establishing confidence that consolidating middleware does not increase risk.
I agree with Lori that many firms are not ready to hand over critical functions to the cloud where what is happening is truly smushy, but when the firm owns the specialized hardware, and can confidently manage traffic flow, sharing infrastructure is increasingly happening today.
The world’s only hardware Market Data Factory
Today Solace announced a partnership with BCC Group International, headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. BCC has selected Solace’s message routing technology to power their Market Data Factory, a powerful solution that offers their customers greater independence from market data suppliers and lowers risk. As part of the agreement, BCC will also resell Solace equipment to European customers of their Market Data Factory.
We are delighted to add BCC Group to our growing list of partners.