Service-oriented architecture (SOA) writes Michael Hardy, Washington Technology associate editor, is entrenching itself as the model for future IT networks, and open standards are playing an important role in the move away from proprietary solutions. With the current and developing technology, there is no longer a reason to stash data in information silos rather than allowing it to flow down to personnel at the operational level.
It used to be the case that the soldiers in the U.S. Army, the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, all of whom are responsible for annually reviewing his or her Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), did so by relying on the mail to perform the updating and correcting of their personal information, an expensive and time consuming operation. Now, the Army has moved to an interactive Personnel Electronic Record Management System (iPERMS) that uses clustered Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) as web tier servers.
In its effort to stay ahead of the market, Sun inaugurated the Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) project, a hardware and software platform designed to overcome the challenges that currently inhibit the development of the emerging network of things. Project Director Roger Meike sees the field as promising, saying, "These little devices may be something where you have hundreds of them in your car and thousands of them in your home and office and they're just surrounding you every day. Al Riske writes about the Suns SPOT project.
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