Unified Computing and "Network is the Computer" ?

Cisco's CTO, Ms. Padmasree Warrior wrote in her blog that “Cisco believes that the network can be a focal point for innovation, helping us enter new and adjacent markets if and when there is the right combination of value proposition and receptive audience.” Ms. Warrior also said “One point I will reiterate is that we see the need for open and consistent standards at many different layers in our developments—from management to protocols to data link definitions to physical layer and power/cooling standards. There is always a balance between innovation and standards, but I feel that in some areas, like Unified Computing, we can can achieve both.”

Personally, for whatever it is worth, I cannot agree more with Ms. Warrior. I am a Cisco fan, having worked extensively with Cisco’s technology for the last 9 odd years. I have reached a point where almost anything Cisco does or touches, I believe they will get the gold. A dissappointment in recent years has been their WAN acceleration areas and persistent CPU issues on some of their other series. But those are small fractions of Cisco’s core market focus. However, if they do go for stuff like data centre virtualisation and unified computing, then they will probably feel compelled to sort the WAFS/WAAS area out as well. May not be easy for Cisco to achieve all of the above with a well advertised hiring freeze on. Could be a delicate balancing issue. Good part on Cisco’s side is they probably have more time than “usual” due to less demand because of spending cuts at most of their customers.

I also believe that healthy competition in technical innovation is good for customers and future of technology. I also do not see any viable reason why people and some competitors of Cisco should receive this move of their’s as aggressively as some of them seem to have.

I tend to agree with all of our colleagues who believe that stuff like combination of propreitory and open source technologies, Cloud computing and network based computing can and will be part of a futuristic technological innovative process. Besides keeping in mind the issues of freedom and versatility that these tend to offer, the technical implementation, from a user’s point of view, so far, has been reasonably simple. An article from IBM about Amazon’s cloud computing services touches on the same.

What has been tedious for amateur technical enthusiasts like myself is the restrictions put on by propreitory licensing. I for exmaple, have tried for awhile to break into applied Quantum Cryptography across networks as I do believe that sooner or later the breakthrough has to come in Quantum Communications and the almost infinite possibilities that show up with it. The part where it may face a hitch is whether the reknowned vendors or Internet communication equipment makers (with the big money…) feel compelled to invest enough behind R&D of the same. The current limitation is the tarnsformation of the theory into efficient practice. However, implmentation of even a simple key exchange script has been challenging simply because I use Cisco and either my scripts don’t work or Cisco’s IOS coding is not compatible with mine. There is no way for me to know as I have no access to their IOS codes. Hence I feel trumped. The point being such restrictions put people without access to extensive R&D facilities at a loss. Of course since that is not a big loss for technology and business, it is unimportant.

Besides further development related to VoIP, VoD, IPv6 etc., I strongly believe that a far more secure internet is necessary. Currently, the financial world is already active in migrating to dedicated fibres due to security risk (SWIFT network). What we very definitely need in future is (almost) unbreakable security and total privacy. I believe what we need to seriously invest into and develop is the applied part of quantum information theory[1] and cryptography alongwith the related disciplines of steganography, traffic security and cryptosystems as applied towards discreet communication. In quantum computing, the laws of physics protect the information using the properties of quantum me- chanics. Open-air quantum key distribution with single photon source (SPS) has been demonstrated in experimental conditions[2][3][4]. In the area of Quantum Cryptography, in particular, it has been shown that there are intrinsic properties in Quantum Mechanics that will enable a Quantum Computer to produce results not possible with a classical computer[5][6][7]. In fututre we need to investigate the concept of development of Internet technologies based on the quantum principles[8] of cryptography, secret sharing and teleportation.

In particular, the possibility of quantum optics giving birth to a new generation of communication protocols over internet has to be seriously looked into and researched. When we do this we shall also need to address the complications arising from the atomic level structure of a quantum computing system such as: decoherence, entanglement, quantum teleportation[9], unitary transformations, and reversible universal gate structures.