Back to the Grid: The Enterprise

I am slowly getting back to this topic, but specifically left it a while before doing another post as I wanted to have a think on some of my earlier concepts and apply some time to see if any of my views would change.

If you are playing catch up, then catch the introduction and the consumerism posts before heading on. I will now concentrate on the enterprise as this excites me a little more and can offer the same experiences as the consumer model – but with the enterprise acting as their OWN Provider.

Terminal Services has been around in Windows since NT4 and is nothing new. Virtual Desktops are beginning to become a more popular topic of discussion. Ultimately they would all evolve in to the same setup as the consumer model, but the enterprise powers and hosts their own grid in either a DC of their own (unlikely) or host it all on a hosted infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC or Microsoft’s Azure (more likely). The benefit of this is that it removes the need for onsite data centre managers, excessive power and cooling, the removal of hardware research, purchasing, maintenance and recycling. This can either aid in the reduction of a staff count or allows the existing IT staff to refocus their efforts to more appropriate tasks.

I am currently working on a SharePoint 2010 deployment, and have had some time to work with Office Web Apps; essentially, a web-based version of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that integrates in to your local SharePoint deployment. This now allows IT staff to centrally manage one version of Office that is deployed, updated and maintained in one place, rather than organising software deployments for staff members and managing multiple versions, updates and licensing. SharePoint also stores all documents in the back-end SQL Server databases, so there becomes a need for users to have access to local storage. Removing local storage, you then are able to increase your security levels as you begin to remove the need for users to make use of USB flash drives and other removable media that could bring malware in to the network, or be used to take sensitive material off the network. This also should then necessitate anti-virus and protection software to be only deployed on the servers, further reducing costs and management of Desktop-based anti-virus software.

However, all this do make server management a much riskier and stress-laden job, all the roles, security, processing and management tasks that were run on the Desktops are now placed on the servers – which already has roles, security, processing and management tasks of its own. Downtime no longer becomes an option and high availability will become a commodity rather than a luxury.

Working for a corporate company, that understands and appreciates the need for powerful software, I am lucky to be in a working environment where I can see the beginnings of back-end, server-based processing taking a lead and the power of the Desktop slowly diminishing.

Exchanging powerful Desktop PCs for cheap, low power dumb terminals should potentially see Linux finally make its long-predicted entrance as a main player to the desktop. All the dumb terminals need to run some form of base browser that is low on processing, and small in size; essentially an upgraded UEFI/BIOS. That’s Linux. This is actually something I think the Linux guys should seriously consider doing (before we get lumped with Windows CE!). They just will never beat Windows in the current environment. It just will not happen. So something needs to change for Linux to become more prominent. Either Windows has to change (for the worse) or the environment needs to change – and the environment will change. Both consumers and enterprise will need these dumb terminal PCs, laptops and slates and they will need a very basic low-end, underlying OS for basic tasks. Once those markets are cornered, then why stop at PCs? Move on to kitchen appliances, TVs, bathrooms.

Consumerism is now taking the mantle away from the Enterprise as the source of leading-edge tech, and I don’t see that changing. This model does pave away for less management and training as workers use their devices to connect and work instead of the business needing to buy it’s own equipment. This setup also reduces training costs and workers already know how to use their own stuff and therefore don’t need to be taught.

The ubiquity and reliability of the connectivity that we will have available to us will drive us from the grey, cubicle offices of today, to home or Starbucks of tomorrow. We will always be with devices, connected and available, allowing flexible working without hassles.

I think I have slightly gone off point a little from what I may have originally wanted to say, but I think the consumerism of the tech world and the growth of social networking is having a massive impact on the way we work, which in turn is having an impact on the way business leaders run their business.

Back to the Grid: The Consumer

My previous post opened up the development of what Internet-based services really are; over the non-descript hype that marketing people waffle on about. This post is an extension of the grid computing future, and how it will go on to affect the consumer.

To try and explain my prediction, think how you currently check your Hotmail emails: open a browser and navigate to www.hotmail.com. Supply your email address and password to log in to your account. You are now presented with a personalised mailbox environment, where your settings are omnipresent along with your email; no matter where in the world you login. You setup your signature, SPAM settings, rules and the settings are all saved by Hotmail and stored on their servers. Hotmail also take care of ensuring your mails are delivered and received, that any upgrades to the software are applied, and that your mail is backed up, and always available.

Now take Hotmail, and enhance it with your applications, photos, music, documents – everything and anything you currently do on your Desktop right now, but hosted in a data centre, on the Internet – but take it further than Google Services or Windows Live. An Online Desktop.

User hardware will change to accommodate the Online Desktop concept. With the shift of processing power moving from local resources, and on to Internet-based servers, this will have an effect on the hardware consumers will use. Desktop PCs and laptops will become stripped down to low-power dumb terminals, with minimal CPU power and memory but with high-end graphic capabilities. The lack of CPU and memory is because the O/S will run nothing more than a lightweight browser.

ANYWAY…let’s put this all in to practice so it all makes sense: power on your shiny new dumb terminal and you are instantly presented with a login screen, with have two text boxes and a drop down box:

• Text box 1 will be labelled “E-mail Address”
• Text box 2 will be labelled “Password”
• Drop down box will be labelled “Provider”

Enter your e-mail address and password, and select your Provider that your email account is associated with, e.g. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc., and you now are logged in to your Online Desktop. This isn’t an RDP session, the dumb terminal loads a Desktop environment in to the dumb terminal O/S window. It will look like the Desktop is running off the dumb terminal, but it will in fact all be running from a server a million miles away, over the Internet.

Now you have logged in, let’s say for example, you want to listen to music. You link your email address to iTunes, so when you open the web-based iTunes, you are auto-logged in and have access to all available music, all of which is streamed directly over the Internet. No more downloading. iTunes is then able to bill you based on a monthly subscription or pay as you use.

Let’s take photos: plug your camera in to the dumb terminal and the O/S detects USB activity and relays this to your online Desktop, which in turn auto-uploads all the images to your Flickr or Facebook account and auto-tags all the people in your pictures. However, most cameras will become smartphones with their own connectivity, making this exercise slightly redundant.

Films will be able to be streamed through a browser from Netflix as well as online gaming – hence the need for the additional oomph of graphic capability in the thin terminal. All of the graphical processing will be done on the servers, before being pushed to the dumb terminal. It will also take online, social gaming to a whole new level.

Document management will work in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s SharePoint, with a browser-based ECM/CRM, giving the ability to create and edit documents using Office Web Apps or Google Docs (depending on your Provider). Permissions can be applied to other users based on their email account, enhancing sharing and collaboration.

Your email account can be linked to Skype, MSN Messenger and Facebook, allowing you to access all of your friends via one channel – irrelevant of what IM service they choose to use. Webcams can certainly be built in to the dumb terminal monitors and provide sound and video for IM conversations.

The benefit of such a system is that you will always have access to your online Desktop, as it will be accessible anywhere in the world with Internet connectivity. Local storage, flash drives, DVDs, etc. will become redundant. Everything will become an on-demand, pay as you use service; which is what the real reflection of the Cloud is. For the consumer, this will provide flexibility in the following:

• No need to purchase or upgrade hardware and O/S
• Cheaper hardware, using less power
• No need to purchase, install and manage applications
• No need to purchase, install and manage security software
• No need to manage document backups and restores
• No more local storage and peripherals
• No more “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” adverts!

Your Online Desktop will be a sandboxed environment, managed, protected and hosted by your Provider. Now who doesn’t want that?

Back to the Grid: The Beginning

This is an idea that I have been talking about for some time (to whoever will listen), but want/need to get it down on paper before Google steal my thunder! The idea is based on “the Cloud” concept; I don’t like the phrase “the Cloud” as it is too easily bandied around by people who don’t fully understand what it means. I will try and revert to phrases like “Internet-based services”, or “the Grid” as they provide a much better description…and “Grid” just sounds cool!

Through work experience, I inadvertly managed to gain a true understanding of this latest shift in IT and modern technology, and reflect better on where it is headed. One of the clients was an importer of fancy goods. They had a warehouse in Waltham Abbey (Essex/London), where they received manufactured goods, and then distributed them to retailers – very similar to the wholesaler principal.

They had a Microsoft-based network, running Windows NT BackOffice 4.5 – the days of Windows NT 4 Server, Exchange 5.5, SQL Server 7.0, and IIS 4.0. Alongside this, they had an IBM RS/6000 C10, running IBM’s AIX 4.5 Unix O/S. On top of this ran their warehouse solution on Informix; containing their order processes, customers, suppliers, and invoicing. The C10 was an 80’s piece of hardware, with a SCSI card powering two 4GB SCSI disks, a 10/100 network card, and a DAT40 DDS tape drive. I dread to think how miniscule the CPU and RAM were.

All the office workers were supplied with a desktop PC, running a variety of Windows platforms, but would use telnet to connect and do they core work off the IBM C10. The C10 would do ALL the processing – the office workers would merely open sessions to the C10; similar to how users might open and RDP/Terminal session on a Windows Terminal Server. Any and all software, patches, upgrades, system changes were managed by us, and were only ever needed to be applied to the one C10 machine. Only the C10 ever needed to be backed up. The Windows desktop PCs acted as merely dumb terminals.

What is remarkable is that this is a system that was designed almost 30 years ago (…hence the blog post title), and yet it’s now a concept that’s being thrown around like it’s something new. Upgrade that original system to today’s world, and you can exchange the C10 for the latest blade systems, swap IBM’s AIX O/S for a clustered virtual server solution, and upgrade the local LAN to ADSL, 3G, Wi-Fi, etc.; all hosted in an offshore data centre with redundant power, connectivity, and cooling. For the user, the telnet session will be swapped for a web browser.

Now you have a system leveraging redundancy, accessibility, and sustainability to run your applications without the hassle of multiple instances of deployment and management. We will/should see an end to the deployment of local applications and a shift to Internet-based services, accessible anywhere and everywhere.

NOTE: The reason I mentioned getting this down before Google spoil it for me, is they recently released a Cloud based netbook where all its applications where Internet-based services and you couldn’t install anything on the netbook itself. The O/S was just a basic version of their future release of Chrome OS(?) and desktop widgets/browser shortcuts lead you to all your Internet-based services.

The Social Future

I had a conversation with a philisophical friend last week about social networking, the heavy influence the Internet plays in our lives and virtual reality. My sermon ended up going pretty wild on the new generation of social interaction via social media networks and how it could/would/will spiral wildly out of control to the point where we will never ever need to leave our homes.

Digital social interaction actually started out via the USENET newsgroups where people could discuss topics and share information – i.e. the founding “consumer” side of the Internet, outside of its DARPA/military based roots. Newgroups/NNTP have slowly evolved in to web-based forums, and newsgroups seem to be slowly falling away – I do know Microsoft are still keeping the concept alive with their Microsoft Connect site.

Then came email, which was pretty much a digital replacement for physical mail. I won’t waste your time with the history or relevance of email, other than for 2010, 1.79 trillion emails were sent – that’s alot.

Following on from that, came MySpace, Facebook and Twitter – there are ofcourse others, but they are the Big Three, as it were. Now 500 million people connect, like, tag, and update through Facebook. Twitter posted 25 billion tweets for 2010. I don’t have any MySpace stats (…just to annoy Rupert Murdoch should he ever read this) – does anyone even still care about MySpace?! In a bizarre way, these services have allowed us to connect to one another that would have been previously difficult or weird. I use those terms as it would be weird trying to look up ex-friends via the phone book and weird if you were on the receiving end of a random call from an old flame who phoned up just to say hi and find out what’s new. Now we can all stay in contact with one another via a cloud servicem that(I think) is making us lazy to properly interact, as it is so much easier to just “like” a friend’s status; which somehow classifies itself as interaction. Lazy is probably too heavier word, but Facebook is so much more convenient; and it’s free so I won’t waste any money making a phone call, or paying for a stamp. Think about what life was like before getting a driving licence: I was happy to use public transport or walk, as it was the best that was on offer. The moment I got a driving licence, I didn’t have “time” to wait for public transport or wait, I “needed” to drive now – driving was more convenient.

The cliche to such services is that as much as Facebook brings us closer together through a digital medium, it takes us further away from the true physical interaction that our human nature is built upon – merely because it is more convenient to pick up our phone or laptop and post a status update. It’s quicker, and requires less effort. I can relate to his, as I spent a year in industry, in 2003, whilst the majority of my friends were still studying at university. On a regualr basis, I would keep in touch via phone, SMS, MSN Messenger or lengthy emails. 2010, I am now in a different country, and I don’t do the above anymore as I can just quickly reply to a thread, see them in my News Feed, and viewed tag photos of their nights out - so I know what they are up to.

Social media removes the personal touch from communication. The same personal touch that you can’t get from physical interaction.

This is where we are now…now let’s try and project in to the future a little. How do we retain the benefits of digital/social interaction but add that personal touch that a web page can not deliver? I am sure the smartest guys at the big social media companies are probably mulling this over.

With such advancements in 3D and virtual reality, are we really that far from a future whereby we can plug on headgear that somehow interacts with our brains and drops us in to a matrix-style/Second Life VR world where we can interact?

The headgear in question actually connects to our brains, so if I drink something in a VR world, the headgear tells my brain to trick my physical body in to feeling a liquid going down my throat and tell my taste buds what it is supposed to taste like. In a VR world, I could decide what to wear and wear to go without taking my pyjamas off and leaving my home. Dropping in to a VR world, I could go to a club and drink lots of alcohol, but not get liver damage or actually drink and drive. I could enjoy the feeling of smoking without putting my physical body at risk. I could meet friends that live in different countries for a night out, but remain in separate countries. How amazing would that be? We could be anything we want, do anything we want….I just thought, we could actually go to work (which would be in a VR world) and not have to shower, shave, or even commute.

Now we can actually interact with one another, but still in the digital space. Tapping devices in to people’s brains is definately a high risk issue, but as a concept, it really isn’t that wild or out of reach.

Ironically, the concept is already starting if you check out the Google ArtProject:

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

All of which can be done via browser. Why go to a museum if the musuem can come to you?