I’m sure you already know about the other “network management” – where ISPs and carriers get their hands publicly slapped for limiting bandwidth to high-traffic offenders. But when is this kind of “network management” a good thing? At a panel sponsored by the FCC in DC, reps from carriers and ISPs discussed what steps they’ve been taking to prepare for a pandemic or other major global crisis – that would force workers to stay at home or work from more remote locations to limit exposure.

Are people paying attention to ICANN? They’re saying that IPv4 will be fully allocated in the next two or three years. Does anyone care? In their bid to make people care, ICANN talks about the state of IPv6 adoption and touts Africa as the most rapid adopter.

SOA soon part of the ‘cloud’? No, please no.

Microsoft – The Silver Lining in Every Cloud. Joe Wilcox over at eWeek’s Microsoft Watch, has been following Steve Ballmer around and collecting some nice quotes on how the company is transitioning. “For many years, we had kind of what I would call the all-encompassing mission, vision and scorecard statement: a computer on every desk and in every home. …Well, our footprint and portfolio is broader than that. “ [In every hand and of course, in every cloud…] “So, as a vision statement we talk about creating seamless experiences that combine the magic of software, the power of the Internet across a world of devices.” The magic of software – something I haven’t thought about for a while. And:

“You need a real platform in the cloud. When we wanted to go after the PC, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the phone, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the enterprise, we built an operating system. We’ll announce a new operating system, one that runs in the cloud and has a wide variety of capabilities.”

• Network Level Monitoring and Management,
  
• Cyber Security: Network Intrusion Detection,
  
• Enterprise Monitoring and Management,
• Modeling and Simulation of Collaborative Business Processes,
• Business Policy Monitoring, and
• Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

In each of the CEP application examples above, the amount of event information available to software developers can be staggering; however, despite all the available information, the capability to sense-and-respond to threats and opportunities is crude, at best.

Folks who work in network and security management, for example, are bombarded with event information.  However, this deluge of event information is, for the most part, “noise” that is difficult to understand.   In network management one of the most difficult things to accomplish is to find the root cause of an outage or performance problem.   This is why researchers at Stanford were funded to focused on research topics such as (above), the Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

These are the classes of asymmetric event processing problems that define complex event processing, or CEP.   Processing events by mediating events, routing events, or running a rule-set against events and making a processing decision are all perfectly valid event processing applications.   However, the core reason to have “complex event processing” is to solve event processing problems where there exists a significant asymmetry between the deluge of “event noise”  (Professor Luckham called this phenomena the “event cloud”) and detecting business-relevant, actionable complex events in an climate of uncertainty and noise.

In my next post on this topic I will briefly the review motivation behind my 1999 ACM paper, Intrusion Detection Systems and Multisensor Data Fusion, where we were working on solving complex distributed security challenges based on real-world experiences with the problems of asymmetric processing capabiilities.  I will discuss why we evolved from an early rule-based expert system model to a more advanced inference model that was not dependent solely on rule-based thinking.   I will also explain why other researchers and developers experienced in complex event detection applications have come to the same conclusion.

Does Oracle run the world? I would have to say no but Raj (Larry Ellison is his idol) and the 40,000 Oracle customers that descended upon SF last week might beg to differ. What do James Carville and Mary Matalin have to do with enterprise software? Pretty much nothing, except for the fact that they delivered the opening keynote for Oracle OpenWorld. (And that’s the only and last politically-oriented thing you’ll hear from me as we run up to the election). For a surprisingly funny and extensive photo gallery of the eye-popping event, check out cdye1’s photostream on Flickr.

But UB40, Elvis Costello and Seal aside, Oracle OpenWorld did offer training, certifications, and always entertaining speeches by Ellison. Ben Worthen’s favorite – “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant” delivered to analysts on Thursday. From Ben’s slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

So did everyone catch that? Cloud computing is complete gibberish and idiocy, but apparently Oracle’s already been doing enough around it to advertise the fact. I will have my cake and eat it too!

We’ve been pumping out the posts from the shows we went to – let me tell you, live-blogging is hard when you’re trying to share apparently miniscule amounts of bandwidth with 14,000 other attendees – and we have even more to share as we step back, contemplate and describe how some of the announcements, info and especially roadmaps fit into our overall picture over here at ScienceLogic.

For example, we released the results of our annual industry IT survey last week. Twice a year – at FOSE (for Government IT) and at Interop NY (for enterprises) – we take advantage of the fact that we have a big beautiful booth at these shows and offer a fabulous ScienceLogic t-shirt in return for a couple of minutes time with attendees living the problems we try to solve. Instead of telling people what their problems and priorities are, we like to ask.
Interop NY Survey - Trends and Challenges
Detailed Reports on Trends and Comparison to Government IT

And I just had to share this one because it is so bizarre. Are VMware and Paul Maritz guilty of plagiarism? You have to check this out to get even part of the picture. Apparently this guy has posted his slides (we know they are from VMworld 2007 because it says so in the lower-right-hand corner…) which prove that the “virtual datacenter operating system” idea was his idea a year before it showed up on Maritz’s keynote this year. Hmmm. And then after posting all these slides and making all the connections between his presentation and Maritz’s, he says he’s just kidding about the plagiarism. Can anyone sort this out and let me know?

I’ll tell you who wasn’t kidding when I went by their booth at VMworld – a certain chargeback vendor and VMware “partner” who was quite shocked two months ago when they walked into a meeting with VMware about future roadmap. Apparently, the slides they saw (preview of VMware’s announcement re adding extended chargeback capability within vCenter management services) were mighty might similar to slides they had given in a presentation to VMware about their own roadmap. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. And I’ll also say, their strategy to combat this – support for Hyper-V coming early in 2009.

On the CD-ROM accompanying the book we included a tool called Passgen. In the book, we recommended that you maintain separate passwords on every local administrator and service account in your enterprise. This is, of course, almost impossible to manage without something to automate it for you. That’s what Passgen does. The tool generates unique passwords based on known input (an identifier and passphrase you define), sets those passwords remotely, and allows you to retrieve them later.

For a while Jesper maintained a web site for the book, running on a server in his house. His ISP changed policies and made it impractical to continue running the site. But because the tool is still so useful, I’ve put a copy in my SkyDrive—look in the “Passgen” folder.

Also, note that I’ve put a new section in the right-side column, “Resources for you.” Here’s where I’ll keep links to bits and pieces that many of you will find relevant and interesting.