Since early the 80′s IBM(R) and SUN Microsystems(R) are pushing onto the market solutions based on powerful machines (clusters of machines). The differences between the 80′s and 2009 is the size and the power processing of those machines. The main idea is the same: there is only one point of power processing and there are many terminals which are using that power.
It was hard or may be it was impossible that those (dump) terminals to be implemented into every single family. In 80′s it was science fiction that everybody to be connected and to be 100% dependent of only one central point (provider).
In 90′s Microsoft(R), with its “Windows” opens a new perspective. At the time it was born a computer system, independent and easy to be managed by anyone able to read and write. Mainframes were still used only by huge corporations. Reasons may be: financial, security or just incapacity to adopt new technology.
PCs were good but they needed to be connected inside a company (LANs) or between companies or individuals (WANs). Because of this, in parallel with independent computers (PCs technology), Novel(R) and *nx (Linux, Unix) based companies appeared and developed new technologies, network related.
Many years, since 90′s to 2000 (approx.) all appears to be frozen. It was not at all frozen. It took many years for the Internet to be able to satisfy specific criteria about data transfer: volume and speed.
Now many countries are very close to “Digital TV era”. Australia for example it is less than 2 years “distance” of this point of time where Analog TV will be shut down for ever. What it means? We are told that it means: movie, news and sports online. This is provider – consumers point of view.
From technical point of view, it means that a new type of service providers raised. They have available huge power processing and very fast and reliable(redundant) network infrastructure. Huge numbers of “terminals” are already bringing huge profits to those providers. Actual terminals can be for example: digital TV, computers, laptops, phones, gadgets and more and more house appliances (security camera, fridge).
Anyone can see that what it was before a huge machine (a big mainframe hosted in a 3 stores building), now it is distributed on the Internet in datacentre. You may locate at a moment of time the geographical position of actual “mainframe” , I mean in which datacentre from which city it is hosted, but it does not means that it will be there for ever.
It is an issue of a few minutes for someone to shut down that machine(s) and to fire it up back 15.000Km away and keeping all the functionalities it have before. Nobody, I mean no user of services provided by that machine will notice that something has actually happened.
Today, “mainframes” and virtualisation are the Kings in the real world. It is not IT world it is our world: school, shopping, entertainment and communities.
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