Summary of Discussion: Imagine a world in which every device with an embedded processor also has a high-speed wireless link. Now any two devices can talk to each other. Devices are linked together as needed to create the functionality needed to get the job done. Environmental sensors in a room communicate with the HVAC system to enable finer environmental control, a smart cell phone and a printer becomes a fax machine, introduce your presentation and your PDA to a LCD projector and deliver the presentation from anywhere in the room, your refrigerator knows the contents and age of items inside it by querying the items themselves...
Devices with embedded processors and wireless links are coming soon. Today, many items we consider as components or appliances are in reality devices coupled with sophisticated embedded systems, from disk drives and monitors to refrigerators and home electronics equipment. All these devices need is the wireless link to begin communicating. This panel will address some of the technical, infrastructure and security issues that must be addressed to move forward, speculate about some of the new types of applications ubiquitous communications to embedded systems will enable, and consider some of the business opportunities and economic challenges that lie ahead.
Panelists:
Summary of Discussion: Corporate VPNs provide a piece of the solution, and also a challenge: how to work effectively with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) while providing a secure tunnel to today's off-site "road warriors."
This panel discussion will examine how corporate network services and critical data can become fully externalized - reliably, cost-effectively and securely to the roaming user within the parameters of a VPN implementation.
Proposed panel topics:
Panelists:
Summary of Discussion: Network traffic monitoring and measurements analysis are becoming essential in the quest for bandwidth management techniques that guarantee performance. The network management framework that mainly focussed on long-term capacity planning, trouble-shooting and performance tuning is now evolving to address the more dynamic flow level QoS control. The increased reliance on distributed client-server and web based communications has expanded the domain of network management from local to wide-area networks. Web based traffic alone typically accounts for over sixty percent of the load on a link, making the performance of web servers a critical component to monitor. The concepts of traffic profiles, classifiers, shapers and conditioners, the parlance of differentiated services being proposed by the IETF all rely on the results of monitoring and measurements. This panel will address some of the issues related to what should be monitored and measured, the role played by web servers in modulating traffic and performance and how one scales from local to the wide area in providing service level expectations of the user.
Panelists:
Summary of Discussion: This panel will offer a controversial and meaningful discussion of the issues that need to be explored about how software and networking firmware will attempt to manage data in storage area networks. Some of the issues that have plagued LAN's never seem to go away:
Panelists: