THE VBLOCK, THE IOT GATEWAY AND THE SENSORS

THE VBLOCK, THE IOT GATEWAY AND THE SENSORSSherif MohsenServices Proposal ConsultantDell [email protected]

2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3

The Vblock ................................................................................................................................. 3

Big Data and Vblock .................................................................................................................. 4

Mobile Computing ...................................................................................................................... 6

Ubiquitous Computing and Pervasive Systems .......................................................................... 7

FOG Computing ......................................................................................................................... 7

Windows 10 IoT Core ................................................................................................................. 8

Case Study ................................................................................................................................ 9

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................11

Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................12

Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the

authors. They do not necessarily reflect Dell EMC’s views, processes or methodologies.


Introduction

The IT world is radically changing with new technologies focused on extending the mobile

device era to the era where everything has sensors. i.e. the Pervasive Systems era. The data

center with its powerful components in processing, networking, storage, virtualization and

management will always be a fundamental component of the IT world. This is where Vblock has

revolutionized the data center ensuring customers can benefit from state-of-the-art components

and integration of leading companies such as VMware, Cisco and Dell EMC. The Vblock is a

single stop shop for a complete data center and the deployment and components’ flexibility

ensure no time is wasted trying to get components from different vendors to work together, and

whether a patch on a component will be supported with the rest of the ecosystem. The Release

Certification Matrix and thousands of hours VCE engineers invest means the customer no

longer needs the extensive effort of component assembly. However, we believe the next era of

IT solutions holds more.

Sensors have the potential to generate billions of terabytes from everyday devices, from cars, to

washing machines, to the air purifiers in our offices. This huge amount of data needs

proportional processing capabilities and technologies. This can be done in the data center and

projected to be expanded to include IoT Gateway devices which will be small hubs present in

the streets to collect real-time data from the sensors, filter out this data, perform preliminary

processing and may be capable of providing real-time insight and decision making. From the

Intel Gateway to the clustering of Raspberry PI projects utilizing Windows 10 IoT Core, we will

discuss in this article the potential of providing IT capabilities, not only in the data center via

Vblocks, but also extending this to include sensor devices and IoT Gateways.

The Vblock

The data center has always been a core part of IT infrastructure delivering compute, storage,

networking, virtualization and management capabilities to IT consumers. This, coupled with the

client-side compute, has been the cornerstone of the era where computers dominated the work

experience. The next era of IT promises even more. The shift from Client Server IT models to

an era where IT resources can be accessed in the Cloud, coupled with the increased

proliferation of mobile and pervasive systems opens a window to a new world of opportunities.

From the data center perspective, converged infrastructure has basically provided organizations

with a data center in a box. Much like a smartphone includes phone, email, camera, and GPS,

converged infrastructure provides compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management

in a single platform. For small and medium businesses (SMB), Hyper Converged Infrastructure

provides a single data center in a box but at a smaller scale more convenient to this customer

segment. (Akkiraju)

VCE Vblock accelerates time to deployment as customers no longer need to deal with different

vendors, researching compatibility of different components, procuring components from different

vendors, and going through the pain of integrating these components. Moreover, upgrading

firmware of a single component must be verified with all others in the data center to ensure

clean post-upgrade operations. VCE spares all this effort by providing all components from a


single vendor, doing the engineering work and compatibility tests in their labs and freeing up IT

staff to more productive and innovative work. Moreover, it eliminates vendors finger-pointing if

problems arise as customers have a single point of contact to refer to when facing any issues.

Vblock are leaders in this segment providing different offerings including the 100, 200, 300, 500

and 700 systems which provide organizations with choice and scale, from the smaller VNXe

storage scaling to the midrange class VNX systems and extending to the enterprise class VMAX

(10k, 20k, 40k,100k, 200k and 400k) systems, and from rack mount servers to Cisco UCS

computing. The VxBlock systems take a further step by offering customers flexible choice of

software-defined networking with VMware NSX or Cisco ACI (factory built), in addition to flexible

storage deployments including VNX or VMAX3 storage systems. The VCE VxRack system 1000

and VxRail address the Hyper Converged infrastructure segment providing modular design and

allowing for expansion as IT needs grow.

VCE Vscale architecture is an innovative solution which enable customers to treat data centers

as modules that can be combined to scale and pool resources to unprecedented levels. The

enabling technology behind this is the scalable spine-leaf network fabric. (VCE, 2015)

The image below offers a high level overview of this great technology enabler.

Figure 1 (VCE, 2016)

Big Data and Vblock

Big Data has been a trending term over the past few years, and for good reason. As the term

implies, Big Data represents a BIG amount of structured and unstructured data which is

generated from many sources including web, social media, sensors and mobile (Figure 2). An

IDC forecast expects the Big Data technology and Services market to grow at a 26.4%

compound annual growth rate to $41.5 billion through 2018 (Big Data & Analytics - An IDC Four

Pillar Research Area, 2016). This is huge and holds many opportunities for all players in the IT

market. The main challenge with Big Data is how to analyze this huge amount of data and


generate insight that businesses/individuals can utilize to derive insight and make decisions

based on this analysis. Some like to refer to the analysis of Big Data as the “divide and conquer”

methodology which includes acquiring Big Data, organizing it and analyzing it. Simply said, data

has to be divided, the different portions individually analyzed, and utilize the power of distributed

computing and storage to put this data back together and generate the insight.

Figure 2 (www.ibmbigdatahub.com)

Vblock provides an enterprise-level infrastructure which can be utilized with Big Data by

integrating Isilon® for Scale-Out Network Attached Storage with native Hadoop Distributed File

System (HDFS) integration to provide a much more resilient and scalable architecture than one

which utilizes commodity hardware. Additionally, this provides a solution for customers who are

looking for support of unstructured as well as traditional databases. Furthermore, Hadoop

deployment can be virtualized with VMware vSphere Big Data Extension (BDE) which provides

the advantage of advanced features that virtualization brings to today’s IT world.

Table 1 summarizes the features Vblock provide for support of Big Data and Analytics.

Solution Highlights Big Data and Analytics on Vblock System

Availability / Reliability Enterprise- and service provider-class, 6 x 9’s

Performance / Scalability Enterprise- and service provider-class, high configurability with dynamic and intelligent scaling

Security / Privacy Data-at-rest encryption, secure data transmission, multi-level segregation, control, and isolation


Protocol Support HDFS 1/2, NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP

Data / Analytic Support All data including structured and unstructured data, select Dell EMC Symmetrix VMAX, VNX, and/or Isilon.

Multi-Tenancy Yes

Mixed Workload Yes

Integrated Support Yes

Virtualization Yes, as well as bare metal, implement vSphere BDE

Operations Management Yes with VCE Vision, Open API. System metrics available

Table 1 (TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS: BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS WITH VCE AND EMC, 2014)

Mobile Computing

According to June 2014 Gartner Statistics, traditional PC sales are declining and mobile while

tablets sales are rising (Figure 3). This means more users are generating data from mobile

devices. Furthermore, in 2015 Google announced it “has shaken up its algorithm so that

websites that are better to view on mobile will be prioritised in searches from phones.” (Google

mobile-friendly pages will make searches on phone easier, but 'mobilegeddon' could hit small

sites, 2015)

This is a clear indication of the trend shifting towards mobiles and tablets, especially as their

processing capabilities are improving and many have the capability of accessing their resources

over the cloud from their tablets. Of course there are also market players which provide a

desktop experience on the tablet like the Microsoft Surface Pro which is virtually a PC in a

Tablet form factor.

Figure 3 (Gartner, 2014)


Ubiquitous Computing and Pervasive Systems

Ubiquitous computing and pervasive systems provide an opportunity to embed small

inexpensive microprocessor devices which are always available, always on to collect real time

attributes of everyday devices without the need of human interference and interaction as is the

case with common mobile applications. Think of a car which contains many sensors and

gathers real time information of performance metrics, then communicates this information to the

manufacturer and the manufacturer can accordingly send recommendations to optimize car

performance and fuel consumption. (techopedia, 2016)

This is not a new concept. Rolls Royce, which is not only famous for luxury cars but also for

aircraft engines, has an engine monitoring system in their aircraft engines which involves

sensors embedded in different parts of the engine and gathers and sends performance data.

This provides insight to engine performance and the needed repairs, which contributes to better

preventive maintenance procedures and avoids unneeded costly repairs which could involve

unnecessary engine replacement. (Aircraft Engine Monitoring: How It Works And How It Could

Help Malaysia Air 370 Crash Investigators, 2014)

Aircraft manufacturers also have similar systems. Boeing for example utilizes an Airline Health

Management (AHM) system which collects aircraft performance metrics, relays this data to

ground systems and analyzes this data to improve performance, fuel consumption and

decrease carbon dioxide emissions. (Monitoring Real-Time Environmental Performance, 2009)

We can imagine that a large industry such as the airline industry has strong motives to

implement such a technology; however what if all home appliances were able to gather

performance metrics and send this data for analysis? B. K. Yoon, Samsung’s co-

CEO announced during CES 2015 (a global consumer electronics and consumer technology

tradeshow) “five years from now, every single piece of Samsung hardware will be an IoT device,

whether it is an air purifier or an oven.” This means a very large volume of big data is expected

to be generated and analyzed in the future and will encompass many discussions of the

standards and its openness which will be the platform for this technology application. Whether

this will prove beneficial to the consumer market is certainly an area of discussion; however,

there is clear indication of market inclination towards IoT technology and its infrastructure will

certainly play a growing role in IT in the future. (Samsung says all its products will be IoT

enabled within 5 years, 2015)

FOG Computing

A field where a lot of work and research is taking place is to reduce the amount of data that is

sent real time from ubiquitous, pervasive and mobile systems to the cloud and provide

complementary computing, storage and networking capabilities at the edge. The expected

significant increase in data generated from devices and the need to quickly and efficiently

transform this data to useful information has exposed a very beneficial idea of creating a mini

data center at the network edge which gathers data from devices, provides processing and

analytics and responds and provides information to take action based on the insight gained.

Data that requires further analysis and processing is sent over the cloud to the data center.


There are already products in the market tackling this segment. For example, Cisco has

unveiled the IOx platform which brings computing to the network edge. As well, Intel has

created its gateway solutions for the Internet of Things along with McAfee security and Wind

River software businesses. (Burt) (Internet of Things (IoT))

Windows 10 IoT Core

Microsoft also have plans to penetrate this new IT era. Here we will discuss two very interesting

prospects; providing developers with a free platform for development and the new free OS for

the Internet of Things.

A very interesting offering Microsoft has facilitated for developers is the ability to use a flavor of

their Visual Studio for free. Visual Studio Community 2015 is their newest offering which is “A

free, fully featured, and extensible IDE for creating modern applications for Windows, Android,

and iOS, as well as web applications and cloud services” and “is free for individual developers,

open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams.” The

screenshot below from the Visual Studio website describes it all (Figure 4).

In our opinion Microsoft realized the great success open source Android achieved and decided

to take this further by allowing developers to embrace the well-known developing languages

including C++, C#, JS and VB to virtually provide applications to different platforms. For the IoT,

this is huge. Microsoft announced its new Windows 10 IoT Core in May 2015 which embraces

ARM processors and is a very interesting option for Raspberry PI lovers. Today Raspberry PI

can have Windows 10 IoT Core as its operating system and applications developed in the

supported languages can be uploaded to the Raspberry PI from Visual Studio. This opens the

door for the penetration of Microsoft technologies in the IoT arena and we believe there will be

more use cases in the future. (Loeb)

We believe Windows 10 IoT Core will be a major player in the smart devices and gateways

arena and already Microsoft has a development website with dedicated projects and sample

use cases for Windows IoT (https://dev.windows.com/en-us/iot). (Windows 10 for the Internet of

Your Things)

Figure 4 (Visual Studio Community, 2016)

https://dev.windows.com/en-us/iot


In the rest of this article we will discuss a sample use case to elaborate on how a complete

system can be conceptually built, from the sensors to the data center Vblocks.

Case Study

This case study will involve a complete system which has the potential to automate the traffic

monitoring process and generate actionable insight accordingly.

In the greater Cairo Metropolitan area around $8 billion is wasted due to traffic, a number

expected to rise to $18 billion by 2030. This presents a significant waste and an area where

there is a lot of room for improvement (Schafer, 2014). Furthermore, road traffic accidents cost

Egypt 12000 lives each year. (WHO, 2016)

In the proposed system which will tackle road fatalities and traffic congestion, each motor

vehicle licensed in Egypt will be fitted with a pervasive device which has an accelerometer on

board, a small microprocessor in addition to the ability to communicate with 3G/4G networks

and radio frequency identification (RFID). This device will beacon statistics of the vehicle to the

Traffic Management Control Center and will communicate with Gateway hubs which will relay

data to the Vblock systems in the data center. Another very important aspect of the system will

be mobile applications which drivers can download from the respective stores and push

messages will be sent to the drivers to provide different information on these applications.

The diagram below illustrates the system.

Figure 5


Cars in the proposed system will communicate big data via the network to the gateway which

will perform high level analytics on the car speed and performance to determine whether the car

is complying with speed limits and road safety regulations. If the Gateway analytics reveal the

driver is not complying with road safety driving standards, a push message will be sent to the

driver’s mobile app warning him to reduce his speed or alter his driving patterns. A fine system

will be put in place to punish illegal driving pattern which risk people lives and properties.

Another aspect of the system is ensuring pedestrians are able to safely cross the roads at traffic

lights. Traffic lights will be fitted with RFID reader devices which will detect car presence via

probing the passive transponders that will be fitted in every car license plate (passive

transponders have no batteries and are cheaper than active transponders). Small embedded

systems will be utilized to communicate with the RFID reader in the traffic lights (the RFID

reader detects car presence) and perform the computation and communication of traffic light

status (red, yellow or green) and car status/position.

If the system determines traffic lights are red and a car has illegally passed, a message is sent

to the nearest gateway which will send a push message informing the driver a fine has to be

paid. The user will be able to open his mobile app and view detailed information of the fines,

reason, date and time.

So far the proposed system has the potential to decrease traffic accidents and road fatalities by

automating the process of traffic monitoring. In the next part we will discuss how traffic time

wasted can be decreased to have a more optimized system on the roads.

Gateways fitted in streets will gather information on the number of vehicles passing certain

areas and all statistics related to car performance. This will be communicated to the Traffic

Control Center, and if the driver decides to use the mobile app for his journey, push messages

will be sent based on automatically collected real time information of the traffic situation which

will advise the driver to take an alternative route which will save time and petrol.

The statistics collected will be analyzed deeper in the data center by the Vblock system which

will assist the ministry of transport with planning decisions. For example the system may detect

that at a certain part of the road car speeds decrease although the traffic density is not high.

Deep analytics can extract useful information that this part of the road is broken (and how

severe this fault is and assign a priority for fixing it based on affected number of daily drivers

etc.) and causes a bottleneck. This would assist implementing and prioritizing corrective actions.

However the greater value in such a system is to gather enough data and generate enough

insight which will assist with future planning of roads, pedestrian crossings, and public transport

facilities that should be implemented. The aim is to limit subjective decisions taken by traffic

personnel and empower informed decisions based on real time data and predictions generated

from deep analytics by Vblock systems in the data center.

We believe the proposed system can have many applications in many countries around the

world, with the highest benefit achieved in countries where traffic systems suffer the most waste

and fatal accidents.


Conclusion

This approach can be implemented in any area of business or government. The ability to use

pervasive systems to collect performance, send this data to Gateways (mini data centers),

utilize this data and send useful information to mobile apps, and finally sending this big data to

the Vblock systems for deep analytics and long term informed decisions facilitation is an area

that should be exploited in the future to save resources, money, and most important of all, lives.


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THE VBLOCK, THE IOT GATEWAY AND THE SENSORS