Grid Meter » On Cisco's role in the "digital home" ...

March 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

On Cisco's role in the "digital home" ...

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Long time readers of this blog will know of my affinity to combine my current world of Grid computing, with my previous world of consumer electronics, particularly as applied to home entertainment. In the digital world in which we live, media data is just that... data.

In that spirit I found this Newsweek article to be pretty interesting:

While I'm not completely sold on his target application, John Chambers does lean on the themes of data virtualization and telepresence, areas where Grid computing in it's non-compute Grid forms has seen some traction.

"...according to Chambers, television, telephone and Web services will flow into living rooms over the same fat Internet pipe. Consumers will exert as much control over their TVs as they now have over their Web browsers, ordering from a limitless menu of programming."

But how fat does that pipe need to be? In an interview last year, Bob Aiken from Cisco showed that one of Cisco's strengths is to think beyond raw bandwidth, using examples that reach right into the living room.

"With other types of applications, like in gaming, some of the problems they worry about are different. The problem they're primarily concerned with is the latency of how they do cache coherency which has the players state information. They have information about the players and information about their locations and state in the game, but you can't have that all in one server - so they put it on multiple servers, and you have to have the cache coherancy associated with that person playing the game at that time and it needs to be distributed quickly. It's not necessarily a lot a lot of data that they're pushing, but the latency is important-and the way they're caching it addresses how to move a player from one kind of a node to another node, and it's all done internal to the system. In this case, the operating system and the network have merged to become a gaming system."

We've all heard about "the battle for the living room." In fact, after being bombarded with this phrase on a daily basis while in the consumer electronics / set top box space, I still have a bout of nausea when I hear it. One of the key points that really resonated with me was in the following quote from the article.

Another quote from the MSN article: "Chambers doesn't simply want to join the race for the digital home of the 21st century, he wants to own the racetrack all the ways in which data flow into, out of and around the home."

As Chambers alludes to, the real battle shouldn't be over the living room at all, but over the driveway and the foyer. You can't get into the living room without first going through the front door.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on March 14, 2006 06:46 AM

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