Bluefin, iVDR & other buzzwords on the horizon

The IT industry has always been an endless source of new products and concepts and this new year ushers in its share amid hopes for better IT spending.

In the next 12 months, rapid improvements in the areas of processors, servers and wireless technologies will fall on the laps of consumers and IT managers who are already familiar with the major IT trends. But even the most IT-savvy among us may overlook some developments on the horizon that can dramatically impact the way we use computers to do our jobs and live our lives. Here are at least five of these technologies that may bubble up this year to make computing better.

Bluefin. Not to be confused with the Bluetooth wireless technology, Bluefin should make a big splash this year, especially with all the current activities in storage technology. Bluefin is a storage management protocol drafted by a group of 16 vendors to handle the lingering issue over how to manage multi-vendor storage components.

What Bluefin hopes to provide is a specification to make disparate storage solutions work together to make storage-area networks (SANs) really possible. It was presented last May for review to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) in Mountain View, California. Bluefin’s development and adoption are gaining industry support.

Grid Computing. Grid computing has been around, but its growing implementation is something new. Grid computing is about tapping the unused computational power of idle PCs to form a virtual supercomputer.

One sure proof that grid computing is being taken seriously, not just abroad but here is the Bayanihan Computing .NET project of Dr. Luis F. G. Sarmenta, chairman of the Computer Science Department at the Ateneo de Manila University and his team of computer science undergraduates. Bayanihan aims to create supercomputing power for the masses by tapping the computing power of thousands of idle "volunteer" or "worker" PCs on the Internet and turn them into "a poor man’s supercomputer." This project won first place in an international Microsoft .NET competition last year.

Pundits say the developments in grid computing are making it more attractive for businesses to design their own grids and maximize their enterprise computing resources for other areas. To date, the most popular grid computing implementation is that of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI@home).

iVDR. Information Versatile Disk for Removable (iVDR) system is a prototype of a removable hard-disk system, which will be displayed for the first time this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Developed by a consortium of companies, the removable hard-disk prototypes include a 2.5-inch iVDR disk with a parallel ATA interface, and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch iVDR drives with faster and more affordable serial ATA interfaces.

The iVDR design was proposed by Canon Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi, Phoenix Technologies Ltd., Pioneer Corp., Sanyo Electric Co., Sharp Corp. and Victor Company of Japan Ltd. – which formed the consortium in March last year. Hard disk drive makers Maxtor Corp. and Seagate Technology LLC have also joined the group.

Consortium members say the adoption of the new swappable, removable hard-disk system will spare consumers from always buying new products to keep up with the latest drive technology, where capacity doubles every year. The cost of hard disks also goes up constantly, but consortium members say iVDR can bring down the prices of drives.

The iVDR is targeted for PCs first and later on for consumer electronics. An iVDR disk can hold up to 80 gigabytes of data.

InfiniBand. Although big names like IBM, Intel and Microsoft have dropped their individual plans related to the high-speed InfiniBand I/O technology, it’s not the end for this technology.

Dell Computer Corp., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. are to build servers based on InfiniBand. Dell and IBM InfiniBand servers are expected to be in the market this year, and Sun’s servers will be released in 2004.

The InfiniBand technology promises the ability to connect servers and storage systems in a data center at speeds from 2.5Gbps to 30Gbps compared to more or less 1Gbps for existing Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) technology.

But without Intel or IBM to make the InfiniBand chip, the three companies will have to source it from third-party makers to support their InfiniBand server lines. Dell will use InfiniBand on its next generation of PowerEdge blade servers. IBM will deploy InfiniBand across its entire server line, from blades to high-end clusters. Sun will also roll out its InfiniBand blade servers and is building a system roadmap for the company’s software and hardware.

These new activities surrounding InfiniBand point to the chance for the technology to mature starting this year. 

Intrusion Detection System. Computer systems may soon automatically protect themselves from viruses and hackers without the use of anti-virus software and firewalls. A number of research projects around the world are trying to make computer systems be their own security experts using the human’s biological immune system as a model.

These are called intrusion-detection methods that teach the computers to spot deviations in their own operations, and when suspicious behavior is spotted, take evasive action or issue alerts. Scientists say the human immune system works the same way: it detects abnormal conditions in the body and tries to address the problem on its own as much as possible.

Security experts say the nature of current and future threats to IT systems has heightened the need for automated and adaptive defensive tools, especially as the number of wireless network users and services increase.