Fog Computing and Its Ecosystem

In relation to "Cloud computing," it is bringing the computing and services to the edge of the network. Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end users. The distinguishing Fog characteristics are its proximity to end users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. Services are hosted at the network edge or even end devices such as set-top-boxes or access points. Thus, it can alleviate issues the IoT (Internet of Things) is expected to produce such as reducing service latency, and improving QoS, resulting in superior user experience. Fog Computing supports emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators). Thanks to its wide geographical distribution the Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data and real time analytics. Fog supports densely distributed data collection points, hence adding a fourth axis to the often mentioned Big Data dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity)

Ramin Elahi, MSEE, is an Adjunct Professor and Advisory Board Member at UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley. He has taught Data Center Storage, Unix Networking, and System Administration at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Berkeley Extensions since 1996. He is also a Senior Education Consultant at EMC Corp. He has also served as a Training Solutions Architect at NetApp, where he managed the engineering on-boarding and training curricula development. Prior to NetApp, he was Training Site Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy in charge of development and delivery of enterprise storage arrays certification programs. He also was the global network storage curricula manager at Hewlett-Packard. His areas of expertise are data center storage design and architecture, Data ONTAP, cloud storage, and virtualizations. He also held variety of positions at Cisco, Novell and SCO as a consultant and escalation engineer. He implemented the first university-level Data Storage and Virtualization curriculum in Northern California back in 2007.