Like a lot of people in the computer business, I am intrigued by the impact of RFID tags and other sensor technology on IT. But my interest is fairly narrow: I’m curious about what kind of workloads these technologies will impose on corporate data centres. To understand this, I want to get a handle on the numbers: the sensor event rates (both the flow rate and the burstiness), what kind of intermediate aggregation and filtering will be performed, and what the resulting datacenter workload will look like.
Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Not that it’s a simple problem, but we can construct some scenarios, assign some numbers, plug them into a queueing model, see how it looks. (Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models and Methods includes some simple models.) The problem that I’ve found (repeatedly) is keeping people on topic whenever I try to discuss it.
“But we can’t ignore privacy issues.” “Centralized data centers are passe – let’s project the data centre to the edge.” (I love that – what on earth does it mean?) “Data centres – not data centre! Federation!!” Or we replace inventory control tags with hospital patient tags, in which case discussions of domain-specific issues rapidly crowd out everything else.
The general problem, which I’ve observed in various contexts, is that it’s increasingly difficult to keep people focussed on simple problems. Of course all of the issues that people raise are real, but in most cases they are either irrelevant or simply complicate the problem in incalculable ways. We need to focus on the simplified versions of the problems in order to use them as tools to analyze alternative architectures.
My dream is that one day someone will listen to my scenario and immediately propose a simplification, in order to make it more computationally tractable. Most of the systems that we’ve dreamed up over the last twenty years are far too complicated, and the analysis of the whole becomes even more problematic if we load even more complex application patterns on top of them.