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Utility Computing
They've all been talking about it for years now, but finally there is light at the end of the tunnel, and the concept of utility computing finally seems to be becoming a possible reality.
Using the Solaris 10 OS with the latest and greatest Sun Ray environment, one theoretically only needs a state-less Sun Ray and a broadband connection of 128Kib/s to sustain a reasonable desktop experience over the internet. In such a case the complete desktop resides in a datacenter.
Going to fast? Allright.
Your PC is "fat". You have paid for a box filled with high-tech hardware designed to accomplish the tasks you and your (probably, if not, skip this part) Windows tell it to do.
While we are all accustomed to this, one still has to ask: is it actually logical to be doing it this way?
In the early years, due to extremely expensive hardware, one huge computer had, in effect, 20 monitors, 20 keyboards and 20 mice hooked up to it, and it had to perform all the tasks those 20 seats were providing it with. This concept of the dumb terminal or the thin client survives, but has faded away into the background due to dropping costs and limitations in it's designs.
And so this has become a "fat" Wintel-world. Nearly everybody who connects to the internet does so with a PC loaded with it's own intelligence and processing power. And all that intelligence needs maintenance, and lots of it too.
Because the hardware sits right in front of you, so does the Operating System and the software it runs. In fact, in real world terms, you have in front of you a small data "laboratory/factory" producing output just for you.
Go look around in your backyard. Do you have a powerplant there? No. Yet you have ample quantities of power at your disposal.
When the powerplant isn't working properly, the mechanics in charge fix the problem in the powerplant. A supply line is set up to feed it it's fuel. A maintenance schedule is made by the highly trained professionals in charge to prevent the powerplant from shutting down or even worse, blowing up.
You are in charge of pretty much everything in your mini-laboratory/factory thingy in front of you. Do you have any idea what you need to do to keep it in proper working order? You know things go horribly wrong inside. Suddenly you get all these popups you didn't ask for, a number of toolbars you don't know how they got there, generally the computer starts slowing down (or is that your imagination). Next off, suddenly it won't work anymore. You have to call your nephew, your friends' brother or whomever is the local "expert". He/she tells you some strange things you don't understand about a thing called a "hard drive" being messed up, and a "virus and spyware infection". Next thing you know he tells you you lost all your pictures and e-mails and addresses and you need to shell out about € 100 for a new "hard drive" whatever the thing does.
Why is this considered totally acceptable? You're not an expert, and you shouldn't have to be. Getting a computer
to do what you want it to do is difficult enough. Just like you don't
have to worry about that power plant blowing up, so you shouldn't have
to worry about your computer's condition.
This is where the old concept comes back again. Enter Sun Ray:
If I tell you that this is it for your desktop, what do you notice? It's a monitor. And it's little else than that.
It makes sure that there is a open line between you and the server, and that's it.
This device is as stupid as your telephone. It can do squat on it's own, and all is well.
All it can do is connect to the Sun Ray Server. And it is that server that does it all.
When you see a nice desktop appear with your text processor, your e-mails and so on, the images are being generated on that there, and transmitted to the Sun Ray, kind of like a TV.
This is good. Because all there now exists is a tower of servers sitting somewhere in a completely protected environment, and this is also where your e-mails, documents, images, music, everything resides. Everyday hazards like water, dust, fire, temperatures and so on do not affect the servers and so do not affect your precious data. They might affect the Sun Ray, although it's far more resilient to these things than a PC, but never the server. When your PC physically breaks down there's a good chance you'll lose everything there's on it unless you are prepared to shell serious bucks to a Data Recovery Centre. When something breaks down within the servers, other components immediately take over, without a hitch. The same goes for replacing stuff. No longer will you have to buy a new PC every 3 years because the old one has become so slow you can read the newspaper before your browser has started.
You yourself are also better protected agains all the hazards of today's digital age. Viruses, spyware, malicious hackers and so on are much easier to repel by a well-maintained and protected server cluster than a 100 simple PC's.
In effect, your PC just became a highly sophisticated, fully redundant and well-protected data center. This is what they call "Server Based Computing".
And who do you suppose is maintaining all this computing marvel? You don't know, and you don't care. Because it sure as hell isn't you any more (nor is it Simba here, which is also good news).
Setups like this nowadays only exist in corporate intranets, because it has always been inconceivable that a device this dumb could seriously work across, say, the internet.
But no longer. With the latest installments of the software driving all this, it has become entirely possible to put one of these Sun Rays on your desktop at home, and have everything reside on a data center somewhere on the other side of the planet, and connect the two through a highly secured private tunnel. Sun Microsystems, which probably has the largest Sun Ray deployment on the planet, is already experimenting with this in the Sun Ray at Home program.
In effect, computing like this has become as logical and as structured as the telephone land lines, the electricity and the water supply. This is why they call this idea "Utility Computing".
Of course there are limitations to the idea. You shouldn't expect to be able to watch a movie in this way, for example. Audio is covered in the Sun Ray environment pretty well, but graphics is the real bandwith-eater, so generally speaking you will notice a slowdown on anything that's graphic-intensive. The same problems occur when you would try to connect more than a couple of Sun Rays, as your bandwidth would be quickly gulped away.
Another issue is of course the local devices. By now the Sun Ray environment supports full USB, so basically anything that is USB can be plugged in. After that it becomes a matter of Solaris support, which is an entirely different matter.
Things that require huge chunks of data to be sent to or received from the Sun Ray server will have problems as well. The most obvious applications that come to mind are scanning, burning /ripping and flash memory transfers. These tasks will quickly turn into a nightmare as even the broadest of home broadband connections are still saturated for extended periods of time as you rip one of your CD's, pumping in excess of 800 MB through the network, thank you very much.
However these problems are managable. After all, there's a huge class of people who don't even know the term "ripping" yet, and especially in small home offices these things are not quite ubiquitous. And scanning isn't an every day activity but for a few specialised corners. On top of that parts of those activities can be caught off otherwise.
No... the really fun stuff starts in a totally different area. For example, licensing. Is it legal to, say, buy 50 licenses for one company, striking up a nice volume discount, and next have users who pay for the service log in and use those licenses?
What about the different laws requiring ISP's to store customer's connection and e-mail data? Technically speaking these servers would not be ISP's, though it would be best if they resided in the same data centers as ISPs do. However, with some simple techniques this data would become non-discriminating and thus useless. Would that be illegal?
On top of that, all of a sudden the distributed becomes centralized. If the concept hits the market big time, we'll end up with racks upon racks of Sun servers & the bunch sporting thousands of users on a couple of clusters. While security is much better on such a system, the risks become much greater as well, for a succesfull hack into such a cluster would be a bigtime jackpot from multiple points of view. And no firewall or other outer layer protection will save your arse when they just sign up for a connection to the cluster, to try it's weaknesses from the inside.
In the world there is a trend going on to decentralize. In computing the trend could be reverse. Especially computing has and always will have a lot extra to offer in centralized scenarios, but the risks involved might prove too great for it to ever catch on seriously.
