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4K views 66 replies 19 participants last post by  prophet 
#1 ·
so there's been a few things in the media lately about 'cloud computing' as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and IBM all invest heavily in this concept . . .

For anyone who's not heard of it, very simply it means that rather than keep your personal data on your computer hard drive, you would store everything at a central 'data centre', thereby allowing you to access everything no matter where you are or what machine you are using

In many ways we're already heading down this path by uploading our videos to youtube or our documents & pics to ISP safe data storage such as BT's Digital Vault

But will it really take off?

Personally it worries me . . . keeping all your eggs in one basket for a start and relying on a large company to look after my data does not fill me with confidence

there are also the obvious worries about these data centres being a target for terrorism, the data being 'used' by those it is entrusted to and basically a loss of independence.

So if it worries me . . . does it worry you? would you use it? would you trust it? will it really take off?

I'm interested to see if I'm alone with my tin foil hat :lol:
 
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#5 ·
glad I'm not alone! :lol:
And until people stop worrying about it then it will never take off for any important data - who knows though, people's attitudes may change in the future :)
but will they EVER stop worrying? Does it not worry you? :)
I'm already using some of the cloud services for some things, Google Mail, Apps and AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and S3, as well as various more geeky ones for demand scaling of infrastructure etc and I find it works very well...

... on the proviso you trust your provider, but I already trust Amazon with my credit card number to buy books, so why not services? I already trust Google with (some of) my email, why not some documents too?
I guess you're right . . . we already do trust these organisations with our data. I'm still not sure I want to trust all my data with them though, just makes me uneasy

you think it's inevitable Chris?
 
#4 ·
I'm already using some of the cloud services for some things, Google Mail, Apps and AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and S3, as well as various more geeky ones for demand scaling of infrastructure etc and I find it works very well...


... on the proviso you trust your provider, but I already trust Amazon with my credit card number to buy books, so why not services? I already trust Google with (some of) my email, why not some documents too?
 
#6 ·
I like the idea of it - as people have said, plenty of people trust in YouTube or whatever, but I have one or two issues. I don't like the idea of it all being in the same place, as if something goes wrong you can't do anything about it and there's no way of knowing how many people it will affect.

I quite like the idea of being able to choose how much space I have available on my hard drive, the service providers will not give you that choice, unless you wish to pay extra. And who's to say that they'll not put clauses into their terms and conditions whereby anything hosted on their servers belongs to them?
 
#7 ·
I agree there . . . they already put 'I agree' terms & conditions boxes on software and internet service accounts which lets be honest, hardly anyone ever reads. And if you don't tick the box, what then? . . . you can't use the software/service :lol:

I worry that this cloud service, if it takes off, would eventually become so difficult to work outside of, removing all option and I don't like the idea of not having a choice!
 
#9 ·
Inevitable is a strong word but I can definitely see a big push towards cloud based services in the coming months, it seems to be the next big buzzword...

Carbon is absolutely right though, it doesn't matter if you and I like it or not, business (and more specifically Enterprise) dictates succes or failure in this world. That said our customers, even the bigger ones whom you typically see as negative towards these things, seem quite positive towards them. We're using Google Docs with partners for document collaboration for example.

Fundamentally for me I don't have an office to put a server in, I like my data to be always available and I know how to use AES encryption for anything sensitive, Amazon S3 gives me as much quick and easy storage as I need for a good price with terms that I can live with.
 
#22 ·
I'll start using it when the government do.:p
Fortune 500 are already using it, I know of a number of what I would consider big financial institutions using this kind of technology. Amazon are working towards HIPAA certification for S3 which would be the first step to financial and governmental adoption in the US at least.

about ten years ago I was doing hidden call and response on web pages using a hidden frame and javascript to refresh the frame and update the parent window with content... some years later it got called "AJAX" became a buzzword and now "The Web 2.0" is apparently the future using this "new" technology ...

Been storing files on server space I can access anywhere for just about as long... it was only a matter of time before it got a buzzword and became "the new thing". My "cloud" has been running at home on my broadband connection for years behind a firewall with VPN access.
and with what, 1mbit upload bandwidth? I'd guess your system would work really well when your user numbers increase tenfold overnight ;)

That's exactly what happened to the Facebook app Animoto and using Amazon's EC2 and Rightscale they successfully survived the 'bump', at their peak using 4000 Amazon EC2 'instances' automatically launched by the Rightscale system (see http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/23/animoto-facebook-scale-up/)

I'm into this concept, I already keep all my bookmarks and photos online. But I keep backups offline too, surely it will always be sensible to so.
Exactly, eggs and baskets and all that...

Incase the storage centres are targeted by terrrorists? Hell even a powercut would bugger us :lol: Ok it's very unlikely but they need solutions to anything that could potentially happen.
The IT industry are more than capable of designing data centres to withstand power cuts, far more so than any residential electricity supplier. Most, if not all, of the SLA's attached to these cloud offerings vastly eclipse that of your electric supplier ;) nPower don't offer three or four nines do they!

As for terrorist attack, it's relatively easy to build in proper redundancy and geoseparation of data such that if a whole data centre is lost the data is not, Amazon S3 offers data centres in both East Coast USA and Europe for example, and that's just one provider, there are of course many different Cloud providers.
 
#11 ·
about ten years ago I was doing hidden call and response on web pages using a hidden frame and javascript to refresh the frame and update the parent window with content... some years later it got called "AJAX" became a buzzword and now "The Web 2.0" is apparently the future using this "new" technology ...

Been storing files on server space I can access anywhere for just about as long... it was only a matter of time before it got a buzzword and became "the new thing". My "cloud" has been running at home on my broadband connection for years behind a firewall with VPN access.

New technology is wonderful... I wonder what new buzzword they'll come up with for web-based software next? :incheek:
 
#14 ·
buzzword yes but you can't deny that the 'big players' like MS are now investing heavily in infrastructure . . . a new concept no, a new level of the use of this concept . . . it appears so :)
 
#13 ·
Valves game distribution program Steam will start using a Cloud system to save users game saves soon, their reasoning is that you can use and download games to multiple computers but what is the point of doing that if you need to start a new game every time.

I'm interested but storing confidental files or important files worries me.
 
#27 ·
Its all about taking the resource demands of a device down, ie no hard drive. This enables the devices to get smaller (ie phones) and to be more relavant than a"personal computer", the added commercial benefits (and security ..MI5 style) make it a big seller to those movers and shakers in the business.
 
#29 ·
I'm sure it all works very well until you lose your internet connection.

Then you have nothing.

If you have stuff on your PC the internet goes down and you can still carry on messing about with pictures and games on your pc.

Speed is going to be an issue. Photobucket when i started using it was fine, in the past few months it has become unbeliably slow, so has facebook and its not my pc its the fact that they are writing stuff which requires far more broadband speed than I have.

We use SAP where I work and the whole of my company is trying to use it globally so progressively we have 'drops' which add another huge section of the company. Everytime more users come onto the system it strains it hugely and the network some days just keels over. or you only need to get a slight problem with 1 server and thats it, 400 users are screwed for hours till its fixed, you put that into world wide terms and suddenly a crisis happens.

The other factor is going to be that big brother will now have more power to look at everything you do and think and it could lead to things getting way out of hand and to much control being implimented on people, giving people the freedom to do as they are told purely because of what data they have. If its at home in your bedroom unless the police raid you or everything totally leaks out onto the internet, its has an element of safety.

Plus points however are that as with any sort of large comercial sized computer systems there are plenty of backups so files may not go astray so often.

One big concern about such things as data centres is the huge amount of power they require, I did read an interesting artical a while back about having floating data farms that are solid state and basically like big ships that have floating lily pad style solar panels to power them along wiht wind generators etc, however it could still cause a problem, all the heat produced by huge data centres could change the worlds climate a hell of a lot, my PC at home maybe only on for 1-2 hours a day, not 24 and if im away then it gets no use at all, a data centre is 24/7.
 
#30 ·
I'm sure it all works very well until you lose your internet connection.

Then you have nothing.

If you have stuff on your PC the internet goes down and you can still carry on messing about with pictures and games on your pc.
Not quite, when your 'net connection goes down you have whatever you've planned for... When you're writing an app to run on/in the cloud it's quite common to plan for disconnection, using caching and disconnected data sets to minimise impact of connectivity losses

Speed is going to be an issue. Photobucket when i started using it was fine, in the past few months it has become unbeliably slow, so has facebook and its not my pc its the fact that they are writing stuff which requires far more broadband speed than I have.
That's a problem with any website, not just cloud type services... Developers still need to design for a common platform, be that 1mbit or 10mbit.

We use SAP where I work and the whole of my company is trying to use it globally so progressively we have 'drops' which add another huge section of the company. Everytime more users come onto the system it strains it hugely and the network some days just keels over. or you only need to get a slight problem with 1 server and thats it, 400 users are screwed for hours till its fixed, you put that into world wide terms and suddenly a crisis happens.
The point of using the a cloud based infrastructure would be that there wouldn't only be one server, most of the infrastructure providers have the facility for hot spares and load balancing etc so that if one server does fail the other(s) just take over the strain and a replacement for the offline one is provisioned automatically.

The other factor is going to be that big brother will now have more power to look at everything you do and think and it could lead to things getting way out of hand and to much control being implimented on people, giving people the freedom to do as they are told purely because of what data they have. If its at home in your bedroom unless the police raid you or everything totally leaks out onto the internet, its has an element of safety.
You're not the only person worried about this, and there are people who won't use the data centres Amazon have in the US, only Europe because of the way American law works, it could require Amazon to hand over data to the law enforcement agencies without telling you under certain circumstances.

Plus points however are that as with any sort of large comercial sized computer systems there are plenty of backups so files may not go astray so often.
For sure in terms of data safety it's almost impossible to match the levels of security claimed by many cloud providers without massive expenditure to do it yourself.

One big concern about such things as data centres is the huge amount of power they require, I did read an interesting artical a while back about having floating data farms that are solid state and basically like big ships that have floating lily pad style solar panels to power them along wiht wind generators etc, however it could still cause a problem, all the heat produced by huge data centres could change the worlds climate a hell of a lot, my PC at home maybe only on for 1-2 hours a day, not 24 and if im away then it gets no use at all, a data centre is 24/7.
Google actually filed a patent on the idea of floating data centres! It's all down to how available you need your data to be, if you need to be able to access it 24/7 then whatever PC it's on needs to be on 24/7, no way around that, cloud or bedroom...
 
#32 ·
is this not the past rather than the future... or at least a vision from the past caught up with the present and future

I have a very old BASIC programming book from before home computers which starts

'one day everyone will have a terminal in their own home'
 
#34 ·
granted I think we agree it's not a new concept ;) but it is a new level of the use of this concept :)

Could we maybe move on from that debate now & continue discussing what the effects of expanding this technology might be?

and who tagged "i'm leaving vzi" ?? :confused: woss that all about?
 
#48 ·
I wonder if the virtual desktop thing will be part of Windows 7 ?
 
#49 ·
The cpu spends most of its time doing nothing on a server
So if you stick multiple virtual servers on one physical server the cpu will use more of its power continuously
Thus from one box more computing power - and so for the (roughly) same number of amps you get more umph.

Most companies hosting large number sof compuers charge by the amperage consumed - not so much for the eleccy bill, but it indicates how much air con they hav eto put in!!
 
#52 ·
Cool, makes sense, would like to see some facts and figures on say:

500 users: the cost of network infrastucture/servers/terminals etc

The bit that i'm struggling with is the 'Terminals' are not really cheaper that 'Computers' that I've seen anyway and users round here are increasily getting laptops as opposed to desktops for flexible working etc
 
G
#53 ·
Cloud computing will take off of that there is no doubt but it will get adopted by home users first rather than commercial business's for the reasons already stated. (indivduals are not going to go out of business if they lose any data whereas 95% of companies who lose large amounts of data will go out of business - fact)
What commercial companies will do is a mixture of both - storage at their site so that they still keep control and can retain the warm cuddly feeling of having their data near but the cloud will swallow up the offsite, disaster recovery copy.
Fears about losing that data whilst at the suppliers data centre is simply down to a lack of understanding of how a data centre is set-up - My company backs up over 22,000 customer, 17,000 servers and 7.5PB of data a day! all across the internet (we're the 6th largest manager of other peoples data on the planet) and i can assure you that all our data centres (10 worldwide) are level 4 secure (the highest level), all data is duplicated on different systems and in the 19 years we've been doing it we have never lost a piece of customer data.
The next big developement will be Grid Storage - once we convert our data centres over to that we'll have the biggest Grid Storage system in the world and that will offer even greater levels of redundency for that data. (files can be spread out in pieces all over the world)
The other huge push at the moment is SaaS (Software as a Service), backup is the most mature area for this at the moment as it's been around for a while and the reason it's being pushed so hard is because it offers a nice, easy annuity stream that can only grow as you back up more data.

Right now is the most interesting and exciting time in the storage market for a number of years what with de-duplication, archiving, encryption, CDP, block level backup, mail archiving, e Discovery for litigation, BMR (that works!) amongst other things - most of which are being driven by the wholesale switch from tape to disc for longer term storage and DR capabilities (you can do so much more with data on a disc than on a tape) - all of this makes me really happy as I was starting to get a bit bored with it all and have found myself rejuvenated over the last 18 months :D

Orb

P.S. is it sad to be so excited about your work and oes that make me a Geek!
 
#56 ·
Cloud computing will take off of that there is no doubt but it will get The other huge push at the moment is SaaS (Software as a Service), backup is the most mature area for this at the moment as it's been around for a while and the reason it's being pushed so hard is because it offers a nice, easy annuity stream that can only grow as you back up more data.
What does SaaS mean to you?

I see only SalesForce . com as a true SaaS (ie multi tenant, single application)
 
#62 · (Edited)
From my chats with Microsoft they are not going down the SaaS model as I described it above.

They will sell their software and make a charge by data volume or users or minutes connected or summat - but not in the SalesForce . com way.

The issue with the SalesF method is that everyone gets the same - and whilst you can change screen real estate you cannot change business flows etc - which is the very reason people want to change software
 
#65 ·
I keep personal photos and important docs on a seperate hard drive...im on the internet 90% of the time i use the pc, all my banking details are stored on a seperate computer somewhere and any photobucket files...

Why would it be any different to as it is now unless someone forced us to keep personal documents/photos on a server somewhere.
 
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