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Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Manageability
ANAGEABILITY REFERS TO HOW WELL A SYSTEM ALLOWS AN OPERATOR TO CONTROL and monitor
that system in order to meet other requirements, such as availability or throughput. Dif-
ferent systems may have very different manageability requirements. Managing a server
farm in a power-conditioned and climate-controlled data center is very different than
managing readers in a smart shelf configuration or in a portal at the door of a coliseum—
and readers are just the first of many new sensors and devices that we will connect to our
networks in the near future.
The part of the network closest to the physical operations and end users is called “the
edge.” In the past, we’ve mostly talked about the edge in terms of moving “smart” routers
to the edge and using “dumb” switches on the backbone, but we now refer to devices
other than routers as edge devices. Figure 9-1 shows some of the types of devices that
might be deployed on the edge of a network.
The middleware and information service servers shown in the diagram emphasize that
one of the primary reasons for placing computing devices at the edge of the network is to
reduce network load by making decisions as close to the physical processes as possible. For
example, the decision to turn on a light when a reader observes a tag should not require
an exchange of messages with global headquarters. A local computing device—possibly ...