By Tim Brown , Assistant Vice-President of NWRDC & FLVC, Florida State University NWRDC: Community Cloud Data Center
create, this approach created silos, each containing individual systems. This also led to “system sprawl” and the filling of data centers with many small, underused systems. The next step in systems evolution took a lesson from the past. Mainframes had long been able to create virtual logical partitions within one physical server and this rediscovery of virtualization allowed for the useful optimization of underused servers. Virtualization also let us create generic platforms that could easily move between different hardware platforms and operating systems alike. This greater portability led to the next “rediscovery,” known as cloud computing. In that past when we connected to the mainframe for services, we did not usually care, or even know, where the mainframe sat. Virtualization (and high-speed networks) gave us the same freedom and it no longer mattered where the
servers and compute cycles physically sat. Cloud Environments
Mainframes to Cloud In the days of the mainframe, “big iron” provided a shared computing environment that was relatively easy to manage. You could track a user’s consumption of resources, such as CPU time, I/O, or storage. However, these large mainframes were much too large and expensive for everyone to have one and the shared-use model offered a logical alternative. With the evolution of the microchip and the advent of personal computers, the computing workload became dispersed. Client- server computing provided the opportunity for distribution of some tasks to local systems, thus reserving the central computer for heavy calculation, specialized applications, and data distribution. Over time, the use of web-based applications grew, where computing is handled by a mixture of back-end servers. Easy to
There are four basic types of
cloud environments:
• Public: The term “cloud computing” usually refers to public cloud, which can contain many customers from many different organizations. Large public clouds can be distributed globally, involving multiple data centers. This model maximizes resource sharing; however, given its geographically dispersed nature, many government-based organizations have concerns as to the whereabouts of their data. • Private: Some people argue that private clouds are not really clouds at all, in that they belong to a single organization. While the owner can rearrange
4 – Florida Technology Magazine – 2024 Fall Edition
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