Juniper Networks Outlines Vision and Strategy to Develop Next Generation Data Center Fabric

Legacy architectures constrain today’s data centers as they attempt to cope with the exponential increase in applications, servers, storage and network traffic.

By rethinking the network from the ground up, Juniper has created a long-term strategy to develop a single data center fabric with the flexibility and performance to scale to super data centers, while continuing to drive down the cost and complexity of managing the data center information infrastructure. This is based on Juniper’s vision for a Cloud Computing Infrastructure that enables operational innovation based on the ability to connect everything and empower everyone.

The leader in high-performance networking today reinforced its commitment to the data center by disclosing the existence of a program within the company to deliver the next generation data center fabric. The program, code-named the Stratus Project, represents an initiative to create a single data center fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments.

The Stratus Project, which has been underway for more than one year, was coined after the meteorological term ‘stratus,’ defined as a low-altitude, flat, single-layer cloud. The Project, initially inspired and led by Juniper’s CTO and Founder Pradeep Sindhu, now spans across multiple business groups and has resulted in more than 30 patent applications filed to date.

Check out here for more details.

Juniper Networks and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) Enhance Partnership to Address Worldwide Carrier Ethernet Market

Juniper Networks and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) announced an enhancement to their partnership with plans to deliver a fully interoperable Carrier Ethernet solution intended to provide resilient access and aggregation for service providers worldwide. The enhanced partnership is intended to bring the vision of a unified Carrier Ethernet solution supporting all services on a single network. The complementary products and technologies are intended to provide service provider customers with the industry's best Carrier Ethernet solution for mobile backhaul, enterprise and residential services.

At the Mobile World Congress 16-19 February 2009, NSN demonstrated a live application over HSDPA, with the base station being backhauled over the complete chain of Carrier Ethernet Transport enabled platforms (e2e) including the following components: Flexi WCDMA BTS (the base station), FlexiPacket Radio, FlexiPacket Hub, and the Juniper Networks MX-series Ethernet Services Router. Also demonstrated was packet-based synchronization based on the IEEE1588-2008 standard.

Juniper and Nokia Siemens Networks have a long standing partnership that now encompasses IP aggregation, edge and core products and have deployed solutions in more than 200 service provider networks around the world. The enhanced partnership further strengthens both parties' positions in the Carrier Ethernet segment, one of the fastest growing network applications for wireline and mobile service providers.

Check out here for details.

Multi-Touch G2

Multi-Touch G2 is a touch screen overlay that can be easily mounted onto any LCD or Plasma TV monitors. This simple, lightweight and low cost solution let you deploy Multi-Touch technology instantly to existing monitors without the need of any configuration. Multi-Touch G² is connected to the computer via a USB cable (No power cable is needed).

This is how it looks like..


Usage (Applications):

1. Gaming using your hands
   
2. Photo presentation
   
3. Syn. with mobile devices
   
4. Mapping
   
5. Illustration, design
   

Malaysian government will be buying a lot of these stuffs for:

1. Infrastructure (facilities, roads) planners
   
2. Tax agencies to figure out where are the high taxable area in Malaysia
   
3. Events organizers
   
4. Simulators
   
5. Security departments
   
6. Marketeers
   
7. Idealists for better multi-media presentation.
   
8. Enforcers like police, fireman and etc.
   
9. Engineers, architects, designers

This will give new life to many more software applications to come. Something to look forward to.

Stuff like this is cool because it is something new.

People will not hesitate to buy because it is new.

SearchWiki, Internet Search and Semantic Web

Not long ago, Google published their big vision on the Intelligent Cloud, which is their version of Artificial Intelligence for the future.

That was great and recently they announced SearchWiKi as one of the step moving closer to that vision.

It is not really a WiKi as in Wikipedia... it is a way for users to edit the ranking of search results but that is only relevant to the user themselves. Which means that right now, if you think certain web sites should rank higher for certain key words, you can do that for your own good.

But Google is actually going to leverage on human intelligence to help improve their quest for even better intelligence of search technologies. This is not a catch, it is just a strategy. Like it or not, Google knows who you are in terms of IP address when you are searching for some dirty stuffs, but who cares anyway, life is too short for that. For them (Google), it is more important to improve their technologies than knowing who you are and they are glad that you are part of the help.

Semantic web technologies hasn't been seeing a lot of breakthroughs for this year but there are progresses recorded.

In the general, semantic web technology is the next step of search engine whereby it is supposed to incorporate automation into your search. To make this happen, it requires complicated data analysis functionality and also the support of natural language processing as well as cloud computing as the platform. You can think of cloud computing as the CPU, the natural language processing as the keyboard and data analysis as the output (monitor).

Let's take a look at what is hot in the semantic web arena for 2008.

Companies	Descriptions
Freebase	Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.
Calais	A tool for users to incorporate semantic functionality to the blogs
Powerset	Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.
Twine	Organize, share and discover information around your interests
Hakia	Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results.
Tripit	Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning.
AdaptiveBlue	the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about web pages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.
TrueKnowledge	UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge
Talis	A semantic web application platform.
Spock	A people search engine.
BooRah	It uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs.
Swotti	Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions.
Dapper Mashup Ads	New ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically.
Inform	Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published.
Siri	Personalized assistant that learns.
Evri	A search engine that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
UpTake	aims to make the process of booking travel online easier.
IMINDI	is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine".
Juice	a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag.
Faviki	social bookmarking tool
Zemanta	Is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts.
SearchMonkey	SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for here and here and here.

So, now we know what the world is moving towards semantic web, still a very primitive step towards full fledged Artificial Intelligence. Personally, I am using Zemanta to help me with my blogging.The biggest benefit is the help of sourcing for relevant pictures into be included in the blog. Zemanta is available as a Firefox plugin which works well with blogspot. And it doesn't work well with Malaysia's very slow speed broadband connection.

This close for semantic web 2008 and let us plan ahead of 2009.

Nevertheless, SearchWiki not available to Malaysia yet.

7 Days Left to Receive USD$10 Millions from Google

The submission date for Google's Project 10^100 is on October 20th, 2008. That means there's 7 days left for us to submit our ideas for a chance to be picked to receive funding of USD$10million to turn our ideas into a reality. It's USD$10million for a good cause to help as many people as possible. What best way to celebrate their 10th birthday, by giving.

Ideas on how we can help our own communities is something quite noble, it does not have to be hi-tech or grand. Let's encourage Malaysians to submit as many ideas as possible to make the world a better place to live.

Check out the full press release.