Tuesday, September 24, 2013

iOS7 implementation of Multi-path TCP promises seamless mobility and perhaps more

Here is a really fascinating article and I picked up today on the implementation of Multipath TCP in the new Apple iOS 7.

What on Earth is Multipath TCP? Put simply it's the future of a smarter Internet. Yes, if you can believe it the Internet is about to get just that bit cleverer and being an old TCP/IP hack I think this is the most exciting thing in the protocols development since Path MTU discovery :-)

So what's the big news?   It means that you will be able to switch a stream of data on your phone. mobile device or wearable tech' and switch the data stream seamlessly from 4G to 3G to the wireless in your office and back again without losing the connection. so, you could be talking on your phone on 3G walk in to your office and have the call switch seamlessly to the nearest wireless hub same thing for video streams, location-based services or anything else that will stream over the Internet.

While for many this may all seem rather 'low level'  Multipath TCP  play a large part in the future  development of the Internet heralding a whole new era of 'smart' Internet and I foresee that it will have a massive impact on the structure, function & performance of the global infrastructure including in  delivering seamless load balancing.


More modest alternative to Oracles New 32Tb Database Appliance


I was following Oracles OpenWorld event this week and one of the things that caught my eye/ear was the launch of the new Oracle Database Appliance that is reckoned to run a 100x faster than anything seen before; delivering what Larry Ellison called  'ungodly speeds,' processing 'billions of columns per second.' though with prices ranging between $3.8 and $9.6m you had better have some deep, deep  pockets.

This resonated with me because here at BackChannel we use MySQL and recently we got to the point where our 'Big Data' needs got so big that we were just not able to process reports at an acceptable speed - you can only go off and make a coffee so many times in the day before you need blood pressure medication.

So with health insurance premiums in mind we approached our sister companies HPC team to design a "Big Data" platform and whilst it doesn;t have the multi-terrabyte capabilities of the new Oracle M5, the staggering performance we are getting from the VMCo designed system with 64 cores, Gbyte SSDs and 512Gb of RAM specifically designed and tuned for our application has delivered what appears to us to be pretty ungodly performance for less than $50k...

So, if you'd be interested in something similar for your business let me know and I'll put you in contact with their design team.