100MB, 10GB, 2 TB? Where Does It End?

 

Bandwidth, speed, RAM, CPU’s, storage, backup, video, mobile, wireless…..bluetooth……crazy isn’t it?

We have evolved so quickly with our technology that the communications industry is in full acceleration mode.  A mere 20 years or so ago, dial-up internet was being born.  The US Postal Service was delivering free disks to us offering programs like “150 Hours Free” of dial-up internet from companies like Delphi, AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink, Ziplink, UUNET, NetZero, and Juno. 

Only a few years ago, DSL was the new trend for businesses and homeowners.  DSL provided a major upgrade over the 9600 “Baud” or “Bd” available on dial-up modems.  DSL is still available today and can reach speeds of 7MB or faster.

To jump forward, T1.5, DS-3, OC1, OC3, coax, FIOS, fiber, Ethernet over copper “EoC”, and Ethernet over Coax provide loads of bandwidth options in today’s market.  The need for bandwidth is growing so quickly, cellular technology, once thought of as the answer to our needs, is having a hard time keeping up.  With the onset of 3G, 4G, now 5G devices, cell network providers are struggling to meeting the needs of cellular users.  Many cell providers are currently deploying “hot-spots” where they provide a land based bandwidth option to off load some of the traffic on their cellular network.  

Remember these types of ads?

To utilize all this bandwidth come new devices.  No longer do we buy the “10MB computer for $5999”.  Now we have laptops with 1TB hard drives and 5GB of RAM, tablets, smartphones, iPads, iTouchs, Droids, Kindles, and even desktops.

While the improvement in peripheral equipment has been incredible, this has led to a need for even more powerful back office processing…..namely the onset of the “Cloud” technology.  The advantage of the “Cloud provides IT departments the capability to maintain enterprise level processing equipment with little or no CAPEX expenses.  The Cloud providers are in the business of providing state-of-the art equipment and security to private companies. With the click of a mouse, a company's IT Director can increase servers, add RAM, double storage space and many more conveniences.

Today’s cloud providers maintain secure, state-of-the-art data centers across the United States and provide inherent redundancy for your data.  It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the advances in technology and bandwidth today.  For a private company, technology is quickly passing by the capabilities of the average IT staff.  The cost of constantly upgrading in-house equipment, increasing bandwidth, staffing, security, power, backup, etc is heading beyond the reasonable expectations for any company but those in the Fortune 100. 

So where are we heading?  I’m guessing we’ve all got some great ideas and some good speculation?  I’d enjoying hearing your thought and having my readers participate in the discussion…..any comments, thoughts?

If you’re looking for direction or advice on your networking or processing needs, please drop me an email at dave@davehanron.com or reach out to me via Twitter @DaveHanron and I’ll be happy to help.

Part 2: "SaaS" vs "PaaS" vs "IaaS"

In my previous segment, we covered a general overview of “Cloud Services”.  We mentioned “Public and “Private” clouds, and gave some examples of each type.

In this chapter, we will be discussing “Cloud Computing”.  There are 3 major types of “Cloud Computing”:

                           Software as a Service (SaaS)

                           Platform as a Service (PaaS)

                           Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Here's a basic screenshot of Expedia

Software as a Service (Saas) should be a familiar term to many of us.  Loads of sales folks lay claim to selling “SaaS” services.  But what exactly is that?  SaaS refers to a program where the Customer utilizes a platform belonging to a provider (the company who owns the application) which runs on a cloud service infrastructure.  A good real world example of “SaaS” would be the travel service provided by Expedia.  The consumer goes to Expedia's website and enters information on the destinations, dates, and times for their travel and Expedia’s “SaaS” returns available options to choose from and offers booking capabilities.

Zimbra is a type of "Paas"

Platform as a Service “PaaS” is a bit more complex.  In “PaaS” a company can create their own applications and merely run them through a provider’s platform.  A popular example of a “PaaS” in use today would be Zimbra Desktop which enables a person to aggregate accounts across platforms (like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Zimbra) and social accounts (like Facebook and Twitter), to make reading and posting information more simple.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds are created consisting of virtual machines (servers, storage, routers, firewalls, etc) which are made available to companies on demand to run their own in-house applications.  The hardware is housed in a "Data Center".  These applications are harder to identify, as one of the main purposes of IaaS is to allow the company to give the impression the platform is exclusive to their company and hosted and maintained by their staff.

The major advantage to IaaS is additional servers and storage may be configured in minutes, not days or weeks, and allows almost instant growth of network resources.  Multiple platforms can share a single physical server, but be completely isolated from one another, ensuring a totally secure computing environment.

The ability to run multiple platforms on a single server creates tremendous cost benefit to a customer.  There is little CAPEX (capital expense) associated with additional capacity and the finance department can “pay as they go” for resources (CFO’s are thrilled with this!).  With the proper provider, customers can benefit from virtual control panels, firewalls, nearly unlimited storage capacity, and many other features.  All this comes with savings in energy consumption, real estate costs, network, hardware expenditures, and dollars spent on IT resources.

In the next segment, we will explore the world of “IaaS” in greater detail, touching on additional specifics and overall cost efficiencies available.

I’m always available to assist individually should you have “cloud” questions prior to my next entry. Please either email me at dave@davehanron.com or complete my form for “More Information” located on the side of my blog page.  If you have any comments or questions, they can also be entered in the comments section below.