Let's talk about this Cloud Computing business

[Kreij]

Chaos strikes.
Your company's internet connection(s) go down.
Bye Bye Cloud ... and all the company data until it's fixed.

Unless of course you have a synced, offline backup in-house ... but what's the point of the cloud then? More on that in a minute ...

You need that 500MB presentation file to take to a customer?
Pull it off the cloud !!
Wait ... your internet connection is 3mb-d/2mb-u ?
Would have been a lot quicker with a gigabit connection to a local server. Hmmm ...

Now ... it's not all smoke and mirrors.
The cloud would be very useful for fail-over if your in-house server went down. Quick switch over, all is well (as long as the internet stays up) while you repair and re-sync the local server.
Of course now you are paying the TCO on a local server and your cloud services, but you would not have the TCO of fail-over/backup servers.

It's all a balancing act like everything in the IT world.

 

[John Phoenix]

in what way have we always had a cloud with CPU offloading over the internet?

I'll turn that around on you.

In what ways do we have cloud services that through a browser allows you to run applications with faster CPU speeds/power than you already have on your computer?

Seems to me anything done through a browser will be limited in some ways as opposed to having the real app run locally, therefore just because some server has a double quad Pentium 5000 that runs at 50.0 GHZ it won't be any faster than my P4 2.0 ghz. The browser and net connection/bandwidth are limiting factors.

Now we have Netbooks, Internet Phones even web based operating systems like Google's Android and the Chrome OS - all devices with little or no local storage. These force people to use internet based services for their whole computer experience. They offer plenty for social communication but they cannot play the latest FPS shooter, connect to Second Life or anything else CPU/GPU intense or where you need to have the app locally installed. This experience is not for me.

I bought a real laptop to use in place as an IPhone and it's powerful enough to play games with good storage space and good CPU/GPU. It don't fit in my pocket but it's portable enough for me. I can make and receive phone calls much cheaper than a cell phone plan. The tradeoff is well worth it.

 

[Frick]

Now we have Netbooks, Internet Phones even web based operating systems like Google's Android and the Chrome OS - all devices with little or no local storage. These force people to use internet based services for their whole computer experience. They offer plenty for social communication but they cannot play the latest FPS shooter, connect to Second Life or anything else CPU/GPU intense or where you need to have the app locally installed. This experience is not for me.

I bought a real laptop to use in place as an IPhone and it's powerful enough to play games with good storage space and good CPU/GPU. It don't fit in my pocket but it's portable enough for me. I can make and receive phone calls much cheaper than a cell phone plan. The tradeoff is well worth it.

This is all correct, but not all people need that. The experience is not for you, or me actually, but for tons of people it is. People live their entire lives online nowadays and pay little attention to hardware or performance, and for them this is a good thing imo. Until the line goes down of course, but you cannot be protected from everything.

I'll turn that around on you.

In what ways do we have cloud services that through a browser allows you to run applications with faster CPU speeds/power than you already have on your computer?

Seems to me anything done through a browser will be limited in some ways as opposed to having the real app run locally, therefore just because some server has a double quad Pentium 5000 that runs at 50.0 GHZ it won't be any faster than my P4 2.0 ghz. The browser and net connection/bandwidth are limiting factors.

I think one of the points is you can use any computer and still be productive. I think of it as corporations use Exchange and whatnot, but globally. And sometimes you do not have that power, like the weaker tablets that will come. Or smartphones.

 

[John Phoenix]

I agree. With your laptop : Pentium M 1.6 Ghz | 1GB DDR | Intel Extreme 2 | 15" TFT | 60GB | WinXP, you can get more done with server side apps these days than you could with local apps alone. Heck run Linux on that system and boost your productivity that much more - well at least make better use of your resources with Linux.

BTW, I'd like to know the meaning behind your sig file: "Another innocent life is converted to XP in what's usually called the circle of life."

 

[Frick]

Aye, I've been using Linux in the past, but it was some years ago and it feels like I've lost a bit there, so I think I might have the laptop as a linus playground.

And the quote is just from a guy that played Arcanum, and he said just that. Those innocent lifes in role playing games are converted to sweet sweet experience points.

 

[randolph]

Cloud is not a gimmick or marketing strategy. It's been coming for a long time and it will dominate in the future - the problem with individual servers is their fragility. Forget all the scalability reasons for using cloud services and think about the number of times businesses have lost data because their hard drives have crashed. These cloud services are all on SAN storage which is infinitely more reliable. Add to that the ability to access it from anywhere and you've got the reason that people are switchting to the cloud en mass.

I've got a single server on stratogen which is running microsoft small business server - it's doing email, file server, my website and all in the cloud. I'm not one of these cloud evangalists but I do see the real value for a business. If I were to have that server sitting in my office I'd have to maintain it, do the backups, have a disaster recovery plan etc. and for a small business that's simply unrealistic. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth!

If you are interested the product I'm using is VMware hosting

 

[panchoman]

Cloud is not a gimmick or marketing strategy. It's been coming for a long time and it will dominate in the future - the problem with individual servers is their fragility. Forget all the scalability reasons for using cloud services and think about the number of times businesses have lost data because their hard drives have crashed. These cloud services are all on SAN storage which is infinitely more reliable. Add to that the ability to access it from anywhere and you've got the reason that people are switchting to the cloud en mass.

I've got a single server on stratogen which is running microsoft small business server - it's doing email, file server, my website and all in the cloud. I'm not one of these cloud evangalists but I do see the real value for a business. If I were to have that server sitting in my office I'd have to maintain it, do the backups, have a disaster recovery plan etc. and for a small business that's simply unrealistic. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth!

If you are interested the product I'm using is VMware hosting

what he said, is what cloud computing used to be.. it's about combining thousands of servers into a "cloud" so to speak, where when you were to say host a website, it wouldn't just be stored on the 1 hard drive of 1 machine, it's stored collectively in a cloud, with lots of redundency, so that if one machine goes down, the cloud is still there...

microsoft uses cloud as their marketing because it's all the hype first off, with companies like google amazon ibm and oracle pioneering this powerful technology, companies like google and microsoft are also using cloud as a method of promoting online storage of data, for ex. microsoft office live, and gmail.

my dad actually designs server management and deployment software for ibm's new cloud computing technology... and i get to watch the jeopardy match vs watson tommorow(will air in feb), because he worked on some of the deployment and software behind the supercomputer and how it draws info from vast sources of data..

 

[pr0n Inspector]

Here, have this ridiculous networked C64, enjoy the mainframescloud.