Re: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG

My brother is the IT Director at The Washington Post. When he asked my opinion
about cloud computing, I raised the objection about trusting a 3rd party with
your data. He replied that he didn't have a problem with that, AT ALL. That
can be addressed by contract. I began changing my mind about cloud computing.
I'm reading the book Thinking of Offering a Cloud Solution? by Ian Gotts and
Stephen Parker.

Okay, so some people don't trust banks. And they hide their "valuable" money
under a mattress. The majority however realize that it's too expensive and too
complicated too insecure set up their own bank, and to offer a comparable level
of service that financial institutions offer. How is your HA / DR
infrastructure?

I was just getting into computing when companies began leaving EDS, in favor of
on premise servers. I agree that the AS/400 rode that wave. But now, fiber
optic networks are popping up all over. And users are doing and expecting more
and more from mobile devices. It's a different world. And cloud computing will
play a big role, I think.

I do believe that IBM i on Power Servers offer the BEST architecture for cloud
computing. Server farms won't cut it. Facebook has a problem. They partly
addressed it by transforming their PHP scripts to C, and compiling them. But
then it took something like 9 months to deploy them across tens of thousands of
servers. IBM's answer, coming soon, will be 256 core Power servers, and an
operating system that actually understands how to manage workloads on a
centralized server.

-Nathan.




----- Original Message ----
From: Bob P. Roche <BRoche@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, July 29, 2010 7:17:55 AM
Subject: RE: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG

But "cloud computing" or "utility computing" or "software as a service",
are all the same thing. This was done in the past. Companies couldn't
afford computers and bought time on them. then things got the to point we
could control our own data. I agree that a percentage of the market will
go to Some server farm owned by someone else, But with the security
problems, and rules governing how data must be controlled. Some companies
are still going to find it easier (safer) to keep that control themselves.
They already have the infrastructure so why throw it away and trust
someone else with your companies private information.

You said "learn from history don't repeat it." But, whatever you want to
call cloud computing, it's still just buying time on someone else's
machine. Looking back in history, it's been done, should we repeat it?