NEW YORK-Changing things inside a network is about to get easier by orders of magnitude, according to NEO Networks Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc.
NEO Networks, Minnetonka, Minn., will integrate Lucent’s Inferno, a distributed inter-networking operating system, into its StreamProcessor, a network forwarding product line. StreamProcessor uses what NEO Networks terms “massively parallel” supercomputer technology for very high speed and high efficiency forwarding of data in a network environment.
Inferno will allow Stream Processor “to distribute intelligence throughout the network, across devices,” said Mark Cree, vice president of marketing for NEO Networks.
Instead of having to reconfigure each device individually-an arduous and time consuming manual process that can require network downtime-“Inferno allows one device to tell the other devices automatically so that the network acts as one brain.”
Inferno’s capability of providing distributed intelligence also has the potential to alter wireless communications in another important way, according to Ronald J. DeLange, vice president of product management for Lucent Inferno Network Systems, Murray Hill, N.J.
“Inferno can be looked at by different people in different ways,” he said. “NEO is looking at managing networks. If you’re a device manufacturer, you’re interested in hooking up your device to a collection of networks. If you’re a (software) application developer, you don’t want to have to write in every one of these technology pockets (like Advanced Mobile Phone Service, Code Division Multiple Access, Global System for Mobile communications and Time Division Multiple Access).”
Inferno can give wireless handsets and other electronic equipment access to complex functionality without requiring them to possess advanced capabilities.
“Let’s say you have a next-generation cell phone and you want the phone to read e-mail messages and give you a summary and who they’re from, or you just want to get information, like the weather where you’re traveling to,” DeLange said. “The poor little phones don’t have 30 megabytes of memory, and if they did, they would weigh 10 lbs.”
Using Inferno, sophisticated software that runs on the network “will make personal digital assistants, very inexpensive cellular phones work with rocket science,” he said. “If you do it with anything but Inferno, you have to write a lot of software programs and use a lot of memory chips and bigger processors.”
Because it resides on the network, Inferno also offers carriers the promise of a quantum leap over the number of Internet services they now offer their customers.
“Java says you can write (software) one time and run it anywhere, but it is platform specific,” DeLange said, adding that Lucent’s Inferno is a licensee of Sun Microsystems Inc., the Java maker. “Inferno says you can write it once and run anything on any kind of network.”
There is another key difference, he said. Offerings such as PocketNet from AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which today provides customers access to 25 different Internet information providers, still operate under a system that forces carriers and customers to tie into specific services, he said.
“We’re about giving carriers access to a menu of services, to all of the market, because the content no longer must be tied to a particular service,” DeLange said.
This is part of a shift in the model for computer technology that went from the extreme of the all powerful network with dumb terminals plugged into it, and then to the opposite extreme of free-standing personal computers with their own discrete intelligence. The third model coming to the fore gives the electronic device the option of working as a stand-alone unit, “and/or to sense Inferno-enabled servers in the networks with a `secret handshake,’ ” DeLange said.
“Inferno allows you once and for all to have full and secure access to the network, whether you’re on your cell phone or watching television. No one else gets you there.”