A Little History of Mainframes and Cloud Computing

Taken from http://www.abricocotier.fr/

Years ago, applications were all run from mainframes, which were large central computers with lots of storage space and memory (by the standards of the time, anyway). Everyone had terminals which didn’t have much computing power, and simply connected to the mainframe in order to run the applications. All of the applications were actually on the mainframe. This sometimes proved to be expensive, as everyone needed to “share” one big computer.

Over the years, this changed. Individual desktop computers (and then, laptop computers) became more powerful. It made more sense to start running applications on your own computer so that there was no need to share processing power. Computers could still be connected to “centralized” systems, but these systems concentrating on sharing storage, printers, reference information and databases -- things that usually should be shared. Connections were slow though, so there was only so much that you could store over a network link before the transfer speeds started to get annoying.

Nowadays, we’re kind of in a hybrid between the two. Our computers are still (and continue to grow) even more powerful. However, the network links are also becoming faster, and so are the centralized computers (usually called servers). Advances in technology also allow us to cluster multiple severs together so that they can assist each other in storage, processing and applications. Clustering is also useful because it’s easier to add a new server to an existing cluster than to upgrade what’s already in place. We call these clusters “the cloud”.

In addition, we’re more concerned about mobility. Most of us have more than one device, whether it’s a laptop, desktop, PDA or something else. We want to be able to access our applications and files no matter where we are or what device we’re on. We also have the Internet, which connects all of our devices together, along with our co-workers and friends. Why not have all of our applications and data accessible from the Internet?

We’ll be posting again a bit later this week on how to leverage cloud computing in your organization.

Taken from http://www.abricocotier.fr/