Back in March which seems like ages ago, Aruba Networks announced the release of Aruba ESP. It’s the industry’s first cloud-native platform designed to automate, unify and secure the Edge. Why the need for this new platform in today’s world? What are its secret powers for your network? And, how does it work?
Why the Need for Aruba ESP?
According to IDC, 55 billion devices will be connected within the next two years and are expected to generate 79.4ZB of data by 2025. Combine that with the shifts to work from home and distributed work forces, there is a definite need for the right tools to keep pace. With this large amount of data at the Edge, today’s networks and the teams that manage them are struggling to keep up.
Organizations need to ensure they have the right network foundation while being ready for the next big technology transition or event. This is where the need for Aruba ESP came in. Aruba ESP combines AIOps, Zero Trust Security, and a Unified Infrastructure.
What can Aruba ESP do?
It helps IT with the following:
- Identify and resolve issues quickly, preempting problems before they impact the business.
- Protect against advanced threats from a vanishing security perimeter.
- Monitor and manage thousands of wired, wireless and WAN devices across campus, branch, data center, or remote worker locations.
- Quickly deploy network services at scale at support changing business needs.
- Allow continued infrastructure investment in the face of uncertain financial changes.
Aruba ESP offers services at the Edge that include onboarding, provisioning, orchestration, analytics, location and management. These are accessed through Aruba Central. The SaaS consumption model enables rapid deployment and provides unified management, AIOps, and security. Through Central, network admins can use AI insights to help quickly troubleshoot, identify, and resolve issues before issues occur.
Significant innovations within Aruba ESP
Several new innovations are within the Aruba ESP platform:
- Cloud-native management for any size enterprise: The industry’s only controller-less, cloud-based platform that provides full-stack management and operations for wired, wireless and SD-WAN infrastructure of any size campus, data center, branch, and remote worker locations to be consumed on-premises or in the cloud.
- Simplified daily operations with unified infrastructure: The latest version of Aruba Central has simplified navigation, advanced search, and contextual views.
- Reduced resolution time with AI and automation: Aruba’s new AI Insights reduces troubleshooting time by identifying hard-to-see network configuration issues and providing root-cause, prescriptive recommendations and automated remediation to continuously optimize network operations.
- AI-powered IT Efficiencies: AI Search enables IT Teams to eliminate “swivel chair” investigations. AI Assist uses event-driven automation to collect and post all relevant data for both the internal help desk and Aruba Technical Assistance Center (TAC)
- Granular visibility across applications, devices and the network: User-center analytics from User Experience Insight to identify client, application, and network performance issues faster.
- Extension of next-gen switching to distributed and mid-size enterprises: The Aruba CX6200 switch series brings built-in analytics and automation capabilities to every network edge where user and device connectivity occurs, generating insights that can be applied to informing better business outcomes.
- Ongoing innovation with new Developer Hub: A comprehensive resource for developers that includes Aruba APIs and documentation to streamline the development of innovative, next-generation edge applications leveraging the open Aruba ESP platform.
Recently, new enhancements were announced that help unify IoT, IT and Operational Technology networks to enable customers to quickly adapt to changing environments and user requirements. Unifying these networks, enables hyper-aware facilities that are safer, more adaptive, and enhance productivity. This is a big leap forward over what can be achieved with basic connectivity and machine learning-based monitoring.
These enhancements are integral to sensing, analyzing, and reacting to device data and contextual information. Virtually every subsystem spanning machine inputs and outputs (I/O) on a manufacturing floor through multimedia devices in the CEO suite can be accommodated. Solutions are available for education, enterprise, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail, transportation and government applications.
Some Use Cases
Some use cases with Aruba ESP-based hyper-awareness include smart buildings, industrial/manufacturing facilities and the broader Intelligent Edge.
Hyper-aware smart buildings for enterprises, education, healthcare, hospitality, retail, and government:
- Building control and digital twin enablement: Identify sub-optimized processes, recommend operational enhancements, and monitor the trajectory of energy usage needed for proactive interventions.
- Context- Aware, real-time integrated emergency response and notification.: It actively communicates with tenants, visitors and staff. The use of 4D Graphics for first responders enables them to quickly see where people are within buildings.
- Seamless extension of the 5G Footprint with Wi-Fi: Mobile operators can extend 5G footprint into the building. It seamlessly powers Wi-Fi calling using Aruba Air Slice Technology.
Hyper-aware industrial facilities:
- Migrating from break/fix to proactive maintenance: Enables machinery sensors to monitor equipment to identify points of failure. Notifies before they happen, improve productivity, reliability, and efficiency.
- Reducing mean time to repair with location services: Provides site occupants with turn-by-turn navigation to a destination without human assistance.
- Monitoring personnel and asset safety: Can deliver real-time 3D situational awareness by tracking the location of people and assets. It can integrate with automated ventilation, geofencing, and vehicular navigation systems.
Aruba ESP produces AI- powered insights with greater than 95% accuracy. It helps automatically improve communications and visibility across and among IoT, IT and OT Networks.
Have more questions about Aruba ESP? Attend our webinar on September 30th or reach out to one of our account reps to learn more.
What is Linux?
Strictly speaking, Linux is the kernel, or core of Linux distributions. I like to think of the Linux kernel like the base plate for Legos. It’s where all other pieces attach to.
A distribution, or “distro” for short, is a complete operating system including a kernel, packages, package managers, and everything else needed. In other words, distros are pre-assembled building block sets depending on user preference and needs. Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu are examples of some of the more popular distros. There are too many others to list here, but here are some resources to give you an idea.
Linux Use Cases
As a long time Linux user, I can understand why it didn’t take off as a general purpose operating system like MS Windows. There are just too many choices, differences between those choices, and perceived lack of standardization. There’s also the reputation of being difficult to use. Why then would anyone want to use Linux, instead of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X for example? Like the number of distros, the number of Linux use cases is also very extensive, so I’ll cover just a few popular ones.
IoT
Open source software is typically free, though some commercially backed distros such as RHEL do charge subscription fees. Linux runs on many different types of hardware such as IoT devices, personal computers, networking equipment, load balancers, supercomputers, and just about anything it seems. It can run on very low end or less common hardware. This makes it perfect for IoT devices, where processing power may be limited, and cost needs to be kept down.
“The Cloud”
It also powers very high end hardware, including much of what powers “the cloud.” Servers powering the internet need a reliable operating system that can run continuously without downtime, while maintaining a high level of security. There are far fewer circumstances in which Linux based OSes require a reboot.
Though I wouldn’t recommend it for most use cases, it is certainly possible for Linux devices to run continuously for YEARS without a reboot. It is also much easier to avoid viruses and malware. This is great for web servers, databases, load balancers, routers, switches, firewalls, storage servers, virtual machine hypervisors, and many other pieces of critical IT infrastructure.
Containers
The trend to “containerize” everything has taken the world by storm. Though MS Windows containers are now an option, until recently Linux was your only option. It is a much more mature platform for containers. There is much better documentation and support for containers on Linux. It is much lighter weight which allows for much denser deployments, as well as portability.
One example of a popular container OS is Alpine Linux . ” It is built around musl libc and busybox. This makes it smaller and more resource efficient than traditional GNU/Linux distributions. A container requires no more than 8 MB and a minimal installation to disk requires around 130 MB of storage. Not only do you get a fully-fledged Linux environment but a large selection of packages from the repository.”
AI
AI, machine learning, and deep learning are also getting a lot of attention these days. Linux offers a number of advantages in this space, including better integration with containers. There are many examples and lots of documentation to help someone building an AI project on Ubuntu for example.
Want to train your model in the cloud, but deploy at the edge to a low powered IoT device and/or container? You will likely have a much easier time, along with better and more predictable results on Linux.
If you are considering an IoT or AI project, and/or the infrastructure required to support it, Zunesis has the expertise. Schedule an assessment today, we’d love to help!
Increased Vulnerability
Identifying what connects to the network is the first step to securing your enterprise. Control through the automated application of wired and wireless policy enforcement ensures that only authorized and authenticated users and devices are allowed to connect to your network. At the same time, real-time attack response and threat protection is required to secure and meet internal and external audit and compliance requirements.
Laptops, smartphones, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are pouring in the the workplace. The average employee now utilizes an average of three devices. The addition of IoT increases the vulnerabilities inside the business adding to the operational burden.
Wired and Wireless Devices
The use if IoT devices on wired and wireless networks is shifting IT’s focus. Many organizations secure their wireless networks and devices. Some may have neglected the wired ports in conference rooms, behind IP phones and in printer areas.
Wired devices – like sensors, security cameras and medical devices force IT to think about securing the millions of wired ports that could be wide open to security threats. Because these devices may lack security attributes and require access from external administrative resources, apps or service providers, wired access now poses new risks.
As IT valiantly fights the battle to maintain control, they need the right set of tools. Tools that can quickly program the underlying infrastructure and control network access for any IoT and mobile device – known and unknown.
Today’s network access security solutions must deliver profiling, policy enforcement, guest access, BYOD onboarding and more. They should offer IT-offload, enhanced threat protection and an improved user experience.
Mobility and IoT are Changing How We Think About Access Control
The boundaries of IT domains now extend beyond the four walls of business and the goal for organizations is to provide anytime, anywhere connectivity without sacrificing security.
How does IT maintain visibility and control without impacting the business and user experience? It starts with a 3-step plan.
- Identify – what devices are being used, how many, where they’re connecting from, and which operating systems are supported. This provides the foundation of visibility. Continuous insight into the enterprise-wide device landscape and potential device security corruption. Which elements come and go gives you the visibility required over time.
- Enforce – accurate policies that provide proper user device access, regardless of user, device type or location; this provides an expected user experience. Organizations must adapt to today’s evolving devices and their use, whether the device is a smartphone or surveillance camera.
- Protect – resources via dynamic policy controls and real-time threat remediation that extends to third-party systems. This is the last piece of the puzzle. Being prepared for unusual network behavior at 3 AM requires a unified approach that can block traffic and change the status of a device’s connection.
Organizations must plan for existing and unforeseen challenges. With their existing operational burden, it’s not realistic to rely on IT and help desk staff to manually intervene whenever a user decides to work remotely or buy a new smartphone. Network access control is no longer just for performing assessments on known devices before access.
Aruba ClearPass
The stakes are high. It’s surprising that more companies have not embraced secure NAC to prevent malicious insiders from causing damage to the enterprise. The uses cases are many-control devices connectivity, simplify BYOD, secure guest access leads to the same answer, Aruba ClearPass.
Over 7,000 customers in 100 countries have secured their network and their business with Aruba ClearPass. They have achieved better visibility, control and response. Shouldn’t you? Contact Zunesis to find out how you can secure your network.
IoT, Internet of Things, isn’t just a word that you see in “IT buzzword bingo.” It is rapidly becoming unavoidable. Whether or not you want it to be, it is likely going to be a part of your life. Fighting this trend would be like trying to fight the growth of the Internet in the 1990’s and 2000’s. It is taking over, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. To borrow a phrase from Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.”
IoT adoption in our lives
If we take a step back and analyze what’s going on, the number of use cases for IoT is astounding. In our personal lives, we are inundated with it. From mobile devices, wearable tech, Alexa, Google Home, internet connected light bulbs, doorbells with integrated cameras, thermostats, door locks, to automotive dash cameras that upload data in real time to the cloud (using WiFi to your phone, then uploaded over your Cellular provider)… and the list goes on and on. The smart “everything” market is exploding. Even if IoT hasn’t become a huge part of your life, you can be sure that it will in the very near future.
Video surveillance is everywhere these days. Smart monitoring of our utilities such as electricity and water is another trend. If you don’t live in a smart city already, chances are you will soon. According to a headline from IEEE , the folks who are involved in standardizing much of the technology in our lives, …
“The Forecast of 50 Billion Devices by 2020 is Outdated.”
Though the article goes on to trim down estimates a bit, this is still HUGE.
Everyone is creating IoT “Things”
Raspberry Pi and Arduino are creating massive amounts of human exposure to the development of products for the IoT ecosystem. Anybody these days can create their own IoT products with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino. There is an endless supply of accessories and sensors. One can often complete a project for less than $100. As this market continues to grow and provide more capabilities and accessories, it becomes significantly cheaper to mock up products. This will lead to the development of even more products that do more – for less money.
IoT- DIY Style
Here is an example that I haven’t implemented. You can find plenty of example projects to help get you started. Using a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, you can easily hook up sensors to monitor moisture, temperature, or dust. You can then integrate a camera for easy viewing over the network. We can apply all of this into a simple data center monitoring appliance. The total cost would be very low. The ability to customize and automate using Linux would be endless.
There are plenty of data center monitoring devices readily available. Some can be quite costly. You may also find that you are unable to customize to the degree of what some might want or need.
Imagine taking this custom appliance, and integrating it into your favorite cloud provider for off-site sensor and video data collection. Then, tie it all together with AI to analyze the data for trends. You can use TensorFlow or whatever your favorite framework happens to be. This will help solve the problem of “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
In the event of a problem detection, the device can fire off some Python or other scripting language. This will automatically migrate VMs to another site, power down physical servers, and send an alert with sensor data and video clip. Once the kinks are worked out, you can have it manufactured in scale to reduce costs and drive up efficiency even further.
Although this is a simple example, the possibilities and use cases for both business and home are endless. The point here is that innovation is taking place in the world of IoT at a dizzying speed.
Smart EVERYTHING
We are now measuring and controlling just about everything imaginable. Here are some examples of IoT use cases for business:
-
- Smart cities
- Smart energy
- Smart signage
- Smart cars/trucks/planes/buses/etc
- Smart agriculture
- Smart Buildings
- Smart Hospitals/Health Monitoring
- Smart Retail
- Smart Manufacturing
- Smart Supply Chain
Smart Almost Anything You Can Possibly Imagine….
Are you prepared for the massive flood of data on your network?
With devices that either produce or receive video streams, data flowing through our networks is growing at an exponential scale. On top of IoT taking over the world, AI is analyzing this data in ways like never before. We are increasing our collective knowledge about everything imaginable at a speed never thought possible.
Wireless devices are consuming network resources like it’s going out of style. The wired network required to support it continues to require growth as well. We also have to worry about our security posture for all of these devices on the network. Is your network ready now? Is it ready to handle demand 3 years, or even one year from now?
If you are considering an IoT or AI project, or the wireless and wired network and security required to support it, Zunesis has the expertise. Schedule an assessment today, we’d love to help!
IoT, Internet of Things, isn’t just a word that you see in “IT buzzword bingo.” It is rapidly becoming unavoidable. Whether or not you want it to be, it is likely going to be a part of your life. Fighting this trend would be like trying to fight the growth of the Internet in the 1990’s and 2000’s. It is taking over, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. To borrow a phrase from Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.”
IoT adoption in our lives
If we take a step back and analyze what’s going on, the number of use cases for IoT is astounding. In our personal lives, we are inundated with it. From mobile devices, wearable tech, Alexa, Google Home, internet connected light bulbs, doorbells with integrated cameras, thermostats, door locks, to automotive dash cameras that upload data in real time to the cloud (using WiFi to your phone, then uploaded over your Cellular provider)… and the list goes on and on. The smart “everything” market is exploding. Even if IoT hasn’t become a huge part of your life, you can be sure that it will in the very near future.
Video surveillance is everywhere these days. Smart monitoring of our utilities such as electricity and water is another trend. If you don’t live in a smart city already, chances are you will soon. According to a headline from IEEE , the folks who are involved in standardizing much of the technology in our lives, …
“The Forecast of 50 Billion Devices by 2020 is Outdated.”
Though the article goes on to trim down estimates a bit, this is still HUGE.
Everyone is creating IoT “Things”
Raspberry Pi and Arduino are creating massive amounts of human exposure to the development of products for the IoT ecosystem. Anybody these days can create their own IoT products with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino. There is an endless supply of accessories and sensors. One can often complete a project for less than $100. As this market continues to grow and provide more capabilities and accessories, it becomes significantly cheaper to mock up products. This will lead to the development of even more products that do more – for less money.
IoT- DIY Style
Here is an example that I haven’t implemented. You can find plenty of example projects to help get you started. Using a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, you can easily hook up sensors to monitor moisture, temperature, or dust. You can then integrate a camera for easy viewing over the network. We can apply all of this into a simple data center monitoring appliance. The total cost would be very low. The ability to customize and automate using Linux would be endless.
There are plenty of data center monitoring devices readily available. Some can be quite costly. You may also find that you are unable to customize to the degree of what some might want or need.
Imagine taking this custom appliance, and integrating it into your favorite cloud provider for off-site sensor and video data collection. Then, tie it all together with AI to analyze the data for trends. You can use TensorFlow or whatever your favorite framework happens to be. This will help solve the problem of “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
In the event of a problem detection, the device can fire off some Python or other scripting language. This will automatically migrate VMs to another site, power down physical servers, and send an alert with sensor data and video clip. Once the kinks are worked out, you can have it manufactured in scale to reduce costs and drive up efficiency even further.
Although this is a simple example, the possibilities and use cases for both business and home are endless. The point here is that innovation is taking place in the world of IoT at a dizzying speed.
Smart EVERYTHING
We are now measuring and controlling just about everything imaginable. Here are some examples of IoT use cases for business:
-
- Smart cities
- Smart energy
- Smart signage
- Smart cars/trucks/planes/buses/etc
- Smart agriculture
- Smart Buildings
- Smart Hospitals/Health Monitoring
- Smart Retail
- Smart Manufacturing
- Smart Supply Chain
Smart Almost Anything You Can Possibly Imagine….
Are you prepared for the massive flood of data on your network?
With devices that either produce or receive video streams, data flowing through our networks is growing at an exponential scale. On top of IoT taking over the world, AI is analyzing this data in ways like never before. We are increasing our collective knowledge about everything imaginable at a speed never thought possible.
Wireless devices are consuming network resources like it’s going out of style. The wired network required to support it continues to require growth as well. We also have to worry about our security posture for all of these devices on the network. Is your network ready now? Is it ready to handle demand 3 years, or even one year from now?
If you are considering an IoT or AI project, or the wireless and wired network and security required to support it, Zunesis has the expertise. Schedule an assessment today, we’d love to help!
Future of Data Growth
I’m certain anyone reading this is well aware of the statistics about Data growth and how it is impacting storage requirements across all industries. This isn’t a new challenge in our industry, but the conversation does have an added twist when we consider the impact of IoT. We commonly read about companies experiencing anywhere from 20% to 50% year over year growth. The terms “exploding!”, “explosive”, and “exponential” are usually found in articles associated with data growth (and now I’ve used all three in one post). While this data growth continues to be spurred on by the traditional sources associated with business data (databases, documents, email, etc.), we are seeing even greater capacity requirements being generated by IoT devices.
For this post, when I speak of data from IoT, I am lumping together data generated by security video, temperature gauges, vibration sensors, connected cars… you get the idea. In fact, according to some sources, IoT data is 10x the growth of that associated with traditional data sets. And, IDC estimates IoT devices will grow to 28.1 Billion by 2020. So, data collected from these devices, and storage solutions needed to maintain this data, will become increasingly important.
Storage for IoT Data
Among our clients, we see a tremendous growth in the need for storage to maintain Security Surveillance Video. Beyond simply providing a place for video streams to be written, our clients are analyzing the video; utilizing software to perform anomaly detection, facial recognition, etc. I shared a couple posts recently, written by two of my colleagues at Zunesis, that expands on this topic. And, Analytics isn’t isolated to video only. The value of IoT devices is that they capture data at the edge, where it is happening, and this is true across all IoT devices. Once collected, software can perform analysis of the data to derive meaning beyond the data points and, in many cases, produce actionable insights. So, storage required for IoT data needs to be able to hit large scale quickly and have performance characteristics that allow analytics in near real time. And, of course, this storage still needs to provide reliability and availability associated with any business-critical data.
To meet the storage requirements defined above, HPE has created a hardware platform and partnered with two software defined storage (SDS) companies to provide solutions for scale-out storage that will grow from a couple hundred terabytes to petabytes and provide both the reliability and performance required of the data generated by the ever-expanding number of IoT devices. The HPE hardware is part of the HPE Apollo family. The software that utilizes this hardware comes from Software Defined Storage providers, Qumulo and Scality. Here is a summary for each of these solution components:
The Apollo Family of compute and storage:
The Apollo Family of systems from HPE are each designed to provide compute, storage, and networking that meet the needs of both scale-up and scale-out requirements. They are targeted at workloads supporting Big Data, analytics, object storage and high-performance computing.
The scale-out compute part of the HPE Apollo System portfolio includes the Apollo 2000 System for hyperscale and general-purpose scale-out computing, the Apollo 4000 System Family is targeted at Big Data analytics and object storage while the Apollo 6000 and 8000 Systems are designed to support HPC and supercomputing. Density, ease of management (all incorporate HPE iLO management), and efficient rack-scalability are features shared by all members of the portfolio.
Qumulo File Fabric (QF2)
Qumulo is a software defined scale-out NAS that scales to billions of files in a flash-first design. With the Apollo/Scality solution, you can scale from 200TB to over 5PB of usable capacity. This solution uses advanced block-level erasure coding and up-to-the minute analytics for actionable data management. The file services provided by Qumulo are also supported in the public cloud, currently on Amazon Web Services.
Use cases include:
- Media & Entertainment
- Security Video
- Life Sciences & Medical Research
- Higher Education
- Automotive
- Oil & Gas
- Large Scale Online/Internet
- Telco/Cable/Satellite
- Earth Sciences
Scality RING
Scality is a a software defined Scalable Object Storage solution that supports trillions of objects in a single namespace. With the Apollo/Qumulo solution, you can scale to over 5PB of usable capacity. The access and storage layers can be scaled independently to thousands of nodes that can be accessed directly and concurrently with no added latency.
Use cases include:
- Media & Entertainment
- Security Video
- Financial Services
- Medical Imaging
- Service Providers
- Backup Storage
- Public Sector
So, yes, data footprint is growing and won’t be slowing down anytime soon. If your data set is outside the traditional business data sets and requires scale-out storage that supports large numbers of files and the ability to perform actionable analysis quickly, then you probably need to look outside of the traditional scale-up storage solutions and look at solutions purpose-built for these large-scale workloads. HPE Apollo, Qumulo, and Scality are a great starting point for your research.
I am the father of two amazing kids (a girl & boy) and I am now the grandfather of a grandson & a granddaughter. Each time I hear about a school shooting, my heart goes out to the parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and the entire community of those injured or killed. Each time, my wife and I talk about the number of lives that are forever crushed by such a senseless act.
I also have the honor of leading an IT Organization (Zunesis, Inc.) and an exceptional group of people who make it their business to help make the lives of people better through the application of information technology. For many years, Zunesis has been providing IT solutions to K12 School Districts in the Western United States. Video surveillance is used widely within K12 schools and is a useful technology in understanding what has happened after the fact. For many school shootings, video surveillance has been used as a tool to document what happened when, where and by whom. These benefits of video surveillance are useful, but they are 100% reactive. What if we could use a combination of video and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to attack the problem of school shootings proactively?
How Can Technology Help Prevent Tragedy?
Rapid advancement and innovation in IoT and video analytics may provide a preventative tool to help protect our kids from further senseless shootings. In a nutshell, the idea is to use higher fidelity 4K video cameras and co-resident video analytics software to monitor school activities, entrances, and exits. Advances in IoT allow for computer intelligence to be put at the edge of the network and provide an early warning system, alarm system, or possibly a system that triggers automated functions based on what is seen (like locking a door and preventing a would-be perpetrator from entering the school).
In the past, we have used video to go back and examine what has already happened. Often it is viewed in a central location by someone watching a multitude of screens while likely being asked to do other jobs as well. This new strategy moves the video and intelligence away from a central viewing area and a reactive method, to a proactive, intelligent, at-the-edge approach. Being able to recognize a person or object that doesn’t belong beforehand could provide additional protections for our kids. Ultimately, we want to keep the bad guy(s) out of our schools before they cause harm. In situations where the shooters are students of the school, the video analytics would need to be trained to recognize things that were “out of place” such as large coats (used to conceal weapons) during warm months or students entering the school at unusual times.
Facial Recognition
High-resolution 4K video cameras and video analytics software allow these IoT systems to perform facial recognition or recognize things that are out of place (like a person wearing a trench coat during a warm month of the year). Would it be possible to load up a data repository with graphical pictures of teachers, administrators, students and parents who attend and work at the school? Would it then be possible to implement specific boundaries around allowable entrances and the times those entrances could be used? The key would be to define which people are “safe” and when they are allowed access to the school. The next step would be to define what is normal and what is abnormal for the purpose of triggering alarms and notifications. Over time, machine learning and artificial intelligence could be utilized help monitoring normal behaviors and reacting to behaviors that are inconsistent.
What About Cost?
The next big question is cost? Access to money is always a challenge for our schools. The good news is that 4K video cameras, IoT edge devices, analytics software, and compute and storage solutions (at the edge) are coming down in price. And because video surveillance is being used widely within our school systems already, these new innovations could be used to upgrade the current video systems. It is likely that these new IoT video analytics solutions will be more expensive than the current reactive video surveillance solutions, their cost should not be outside the realm of possibility. Finally, because the K12 market is so large and this need so acute, the technology would surely become more affordable as competition entered the picture and parents, teachers, and politicians became part of the funding discussions.
I recognize that this may sound like a stretch to some, but finding new ways to combat this threat should be considered and IoT and video analytics provide a possible path for that to happen. I for one am encouraged by these new innovative technologies. I believe in the very near future, we will be able to use technology to proactively protect our kids.
In the past few years, we have seen some significant advancements in wireless technology. Starting with 802.11ac Wave 1, we saw about double the theoretical max data rate (from 600Mbps to 1.3Gbps) from the previous standard 802.11N. Thanks to the addition of 80MHz channels and 3 spatial streams. The next generation, 802.11ac Wave 2, increased those numbers even further by adding 160MHz channel support and Multi-User MIMO.
The advancements in these AC technologies were much needed in the industry, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them “game changers”. The increase in 
channel frequency was achieved by bonding more channels, meaning that the extremely dense real-world deployments could not effectively take advantage of the technology due to channel overlap. Even MU-MIMO was an advancement of a technology that had been around for over a decade – single user MIMO.
The next generation of WiFi promises to be that “game changer” technology the wireless world has been waiting on. This blog will focus on the total redesign that went into 802.11ax, and the benefits that this technology will soon be bringing to mobile networks hopefully by early 2019.
Benefits
802.11ax is designed specifically for high-density public environments, such as libraries, stadiums, conference centers, airports, etc. But it also will be beneficial in Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, in heavy-usage homes, in apartment buildings and in offices that use high bandwidth applications like videoconferencing. Perhaps the most exciting feature of 802.11ax is that it was designed for cellular data offloading, allowing cellular networks to offload data to a compatible wireless network in cases where poor cellular connection is present. Note – I’m a little biased on this feature since my house only gets “2 bars” of cell reception on a good day.
The ReDesign
802.11ax touts a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 14Gbps, delivering single streams at speeds up to 3.5Gbps. Thanks to the new multiplexing technology that was adapted from the world of LTE (cellular), a single AP can deliver 4 of these 3.5Gbps streams to equal that theoretical max bandwidth number of 14Gbps. Thanks to a higher order of QAM modulation, which allows more data to be transmitted per packet, 802.11ax delivers nearly 40% more real throughput when compared to 802.11ac technology. The total number of available channels will also increase in 802.11ax. There has been talks of the FCC opening up more of the radio spectrum, however this is not how 802.11ax achieves a higher number of channels. Instead, 802.11ax creates broader channels and splits them into narrower sub-channels. This will drastically increase spectrum utilization and decrease interference on the wireless network.
802.11ax also made some significant improvements to the Multi User MIMO technology. With AC Wave 2 AP’s arecapable of transmitting 4 concurrent down-streams of data. 802.11ax allows for 8 simultaneous streams, and makes use of a technology called explicit beamforming to better aim the streams at the receiving client radios. This will provide better reception, range, and throughput while minimizing interference on the network. Even more importantly, 802.11ax piggybacks on MU-MIMO with an LTE cellular base station technology called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). This allows each MU-MIMO stream to be split in four additional streams, boosting the effective bandwidth per user by four times. From a user perspective, the network will seem much less congested than with 802.11ac.
The final big improvement in 802.11ax comes from the device side, rather than the network. As wireless technology improves client battery life typically also improves due to data being transmitted faster and further, meaning the client device does not need to work as hard. 802.11ax has built on this trend by introducing a feature called “time scheduling”. This enables Aps to tell clients when to go to sleep and provides a schedule of when to “wake” to receive the next transmission. These are very short periods of time, but make a huge difference in the overall battery life of a device as the wireless card is no longer “always on”.
In conclusion, 802.11ax aims to increase network efficiency, range, speed, and reception while minimizing the issues that haunt us today in dense environments: inefficient spectrum utilization and interference. Consumer grade 802.11ax routers have already begun shipping, starting with Asus who shipped their router on August 30, 2017. Enterprise access points are expected to begin shipping around mid 2018. As with 802.11ac wave 2 the major bottleneck looks like it will again be client devices. To take full advantage of the technology client devices need to be equipped with AX capable wireless cards, giving them access to the 8 MU-MIMO spatial streams. However, I expect client device adoption to be much swifter with this standard because of the significant battery life improvements (which is a big selling point for phones). Only time will tell, but the good news is that 802.11ax is backwards compatible with both 802.11ac and 802.11n devices.
Ocean waters are warming and becoming more acidic, ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising. Warmer global temperatures affect our water supplies, agriculture, power and transportation systems, the natural environment, and even our own health and safety.
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree 1: Climate-warming trends over the past century are mostly due to human activities.
While technology has played its part in causing climate change it can also help us get to solutions. Here are five initiatives taking place in the technology community that can fight climate change:
1. Data centers
The world’s most influential companies including Apple, NIKE, IKEA, Johnson & Johnson, and Starbucks, representing over US $1 trillion in annual revenue, are committed to 100% renewable power. Much of the energy used in data centers is not from the actual technology. Instead, it’s from cooling the servers. As well as delivering on emission reduction goals, renewable power can help manage fluctuating energy costs, improve reputation and provide energy security. It also shows business leadership on climate change. This could have massive impact if paired alongside robust government policy that boosts confidence and enables long-term investments.
2. Mobile apps
It takes some digging to find apps that will help you create real change on a daily basis, but they’re out there. Here are some examples of apps that can help you monitor and reduce your carbon footprint and waste:
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- Oroeco is an app that tracks your carbon footprint by placing a carbon value on everything you buy, eat, and do, and then shows you how you compare with your neighbors.
- PaperKarma is an easy way to cut paper waste. Take a photo of your junk mail, send it through the app, and PaperKarma will figure out what it is and take you off the mailing list.
- GiveO2 tracks your carbon footprint as you travel. Turn on the tracker when you start a new trip, and it will automatically calculate a timeline of your carbon usage. At the end, you can “offset” it by supporting a sustainable project of your choice.
3. IoT
Monitoring our energy usage makes it possible to be smarter about it. Take Nest, for instance. While an un-programmed thermostat can waste 20% of heating and cooling, Nest tackles the issue with a smart thermostat that learns your patterns and automatically adjusts to save energy. The Internet of Things can save energy and carbon footprints with things as simple as using an app to turn off the lights or with apps like IFTTT, which hooks up to many different types of systems. The IoT can also involve monitoring your sprinkler system to save water, or use sensors to tell you to take a different route when driving to avoid idling in traffic and wasting gas.
4. Open source movement
Open data and open source technologies are a huge way to accelerate environmental research and innovation. Take Tesla, for example. By opening the company’s patents to everyone, Elon Musk wanted to make sure electric vehicles succeeded faster.
5. Mapping
Interactive maps really drive home the point of climate change and can lead the way to remedies. Map layers defining vegetation, soil type, geology, precipitation, and human infrastructure can help model and plan for future change. New mapping technology can make us safer and less reliant on fossil fuels. The U.S Geologic Survey’s 3D Elevation Program is being developed to use advanced mapping to better update hazard maps for floods and earthquakes and find out where the best areas for solar and wind farms.
As you can see, many of these things only require small changes from individuals in order to make a difference for our climate. Some will require much more intentional decisions from businesses. The good news, however, is that with this intentionality, individuals and corporations alike can take action to help our climate. If we’re all in this together, perhaps it’s time that we take a look – individually and corporately – at how we can make a difference.
1. J. Cook, et al, “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming,” Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
