Let’s first look at a few terms.
Cloud Computing:
“Cloud” = the network (the internet / intranet / extranet) as the connectivity platform of an any-to-any communication. Add to that devices with computing power inter-connected through said cloud that providing or using services.
Telecom:
The backbone of today’s telecommunication network is the (digital) Intelligent Network (IN), digital, that has replaced the older trunks of zillion of point-to-point telephone lines connecting one subscriber to another through a variety of central offices, switchboards, and the like. In the 60-ies UNIX computers were interconnected and identified the most economical and least congested (analog telephone) lines to connect calling party A to B. Now high-speed data lines carry packets of information that contain voice, video, data, and control information across the so-called “Information Autobahn”, a network of now mostly fiber-optic cables with speeds in excess of tens of Gigabits/sec. Specific mechanisms (detailed in standards such as Signaling Service No. 7, or SS7) ensure the packets that may have travelled through different routes over various (computer) nodes within said IN are then put together at the receiving side. Certain protocols describe what to do in case of a lost or corrupted packet.
Two main principles: Is it data, then the receiver transmits request to resend the packet and waits until successful — data integrity is key. Is it voice, then the packet is simply ignored, to allow continuous flow of the live communication. Some static may do where the attempt to reconstruct failed — real-time is the key.
Software @ Network:
In the early days, dumb terminals were connected to a mainframe, then X-terminals to UNIX servers. The hosts providing storage and computing services, the clients executing programs remotely on the host. Now PCs connected to service providers on the internet will run applications on those servers…
Heard of the SETI project? Fragments of collected (extraterrestrial) data sent to subscribed PC to number-crunch in their “spare time” (i.e., when the screen saver kicked in), search specific patterns, and sending results back. Cloud computing at its best! 🙂
History Highlights:
2009: 40 years UNIX; 35 years TCP/IP; 30 years Usenet; 25 years Domain Name system, SETI Institute founded; 20 years C.E.R.N. proposed the Mesh what then became the World Wide Web; 14 years SSL, eBay, Amazon, Geocities, Java; 11 years Google, Napster; 10 years SETI@home; 8 years Wikipedia; 6 years VoIP, MySpace; … (source: The History of the Internet in a Nutshell)
So, where are we?
Hunger for More:
Since about ten years the storage industry experiences an exponential growth rate. Even a perhaps modest 5% growth year to year may be misleading. For one, the prices (and profit margins) are falling, say, over 10% in the last year what I have seen. And then the capacity of the hard disk drives are ever increasing. From 500GB and 750GB last year to now 1TB and 1.5TB and now 2TB. What would mean, much fewer storage racks needed to offer several PB or Peta-Byte, i.e., one million million byte of storage!
And storage providers already celebrating the next milestone achieved: shipping a total of more than one Exa-Byte (equivalent to, say, 1 million 1TB hard drives) within a year!
With prices falling the demand for larger storage capacity is more and more growing. Who is offloading data to tape, when for just a fraction of the price the data can be kept available online? Then replicate your data storage arrays to another city / state / country to ensure data is not lost when (heaven forbid!) disaster strikes. Companies are not thinking in GB or TB anymore; rather, they add-on as they move along.
On the Internet:
And more and more services are offered — with the backbone of the internet providing the infrastructure of the super-fast transfer even of very large files. We are not only up- and downloading text emails and photos anymore, we are since quite a few years exchanging music and video files, now in HD quality, over the internet. And we enjoy video on demand, streaming or full download.
And we do not order a CD or, rather, DVD with software! We download complete packages with several GB right there and then! And we if we do not want to buy and download and install the complete software product, we could just „hire“ it for specific one-time use — without download and install. Run the application on the internet and do your taxes online, your design work, publish your brochures, perform complex mathematical calculations, etc., etc. (Software as a Service, or SaaS for short.)
…
(to be continued)
© October 2009 Jürgen Menge, San José