IT has come back a full circle

Saturday, August 01, 2009

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Remember the old mainframes? Big, powerful machines that everybody used to work on via 'dumb' terminals? All processing capabilities, applications, etc would reside in these big irons, making them the most powerful machines around, with multiple processors, high-speed throughput capabilities, etc.

Then came the client/server era, wherein all compute power moved out to desktops and servers. This started a cat and mouse chase between the hardware that powered these machines and applications that were developed for them. Every time a new and powerful hardware was released, application developers quickly created something to consume all of its power.

On the server front, new apps emerged for different tasks, each one demanding a separate hardware box for itself. Data grew so much that servers could no longer contain it. This started the storage era and NAS and SAN became the order of the day.

So, there were applications running on multiple servers, each one with its own 'island' of data stored on separate storage devices. This led to another problem-that of getting these applications to talk to one another. Plus, there was redundant data sitting across different applications, making the IT infrastructure extremely complex to handle. One solution to this was middleware, or software that allowed intra-application communication possible. Multiple standards emerged to make this happen, bringing along with it standards like XML, SOAP, web services, and SOA.
Even after this, the problem of server proliferation remained. This was resolved with the emergence of another powerful technology -virtualization. So, instead of having lots of pedestal and rack servers, virtualization can help pack all of them into fewer, 'more' powerful servers. The same technology is also available for storage.

At the desktop level as well, application management gradually became very difficult thanks to multiple versions of Operating Systems and applications running on it. There were separate clients to access different business applications, apart from umpteen desktop productivity apps like Office suites, email clients, etc.

The web provided the answer to this problem, by providing a common 'web-browser' interface to most applications, thereby ending the era of 'thick' client applications residing on desktops. They all run on servers, and are accessed over the web.

This brings us to an interesting situation. We're seeing big, powerful servers running in huge data centers at the back-end to serve all applications, just like the mainframe days; and we're seeing simple web browsers at the front-end to access them, just like the terminals that used to access mainframes. Of course, things are very different now, with technologies like cloud computing managing hardware resources at the back-end, and new devices like smartphones and laptops emerging at the front-end, making it possible to stay connected no matter where you are.
It's interesting to see how IT has come back a full circle, and yet is so different!

Anil Chopra, Editor
anilc@cybermedia.co.in

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