RE: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG -- RPG400-L

I do believe that IBM i on Power Servers offer the> BEST architecture for cloud computing.Why, exactly? Facebook has problems? So does Twitter.But this has more to do with choices of arcitecture/language etc, not Solaris (or whatever) vs OS/400.AS/400 is THE best ON-PREMISE platform.It's the number one selling point.Intergrated, no hassles, no maintenance costs.

But. Now enter Cloud.What kind of architecture do you need for that.Look at Google's infrastructure, e.g.Their system consists of 100.000's of cheap Dell servers.With a custom adapted Linux version to run on it.These servers break, often.But thats no problem, the infrastructure EXPECTS these servers to fail.Thats why data etc is stored redundantly, and there are lots of mechanism to fail over.Server breaks down? No prob; thats normal.They have staff to do this. What would they e.g. do with an AS/400.Proprietary, black box, etc.Google has a ver flexible, massively scalable and resilient infrastucture.For example scalabality.Yes the AS/400 is scalable, but vertical not horizontal.Thats i nice fit for companies, where it's meant for.For Cloud, you need massive scale. You need to be able to grow fast, Terabytes, cheap.Thats why Google AppEngine has no traditional relational database, but "Bigtable".A traditional database can not scale indefinetly.I can put millions, billions, records in Bigtable. And these can be retrieved fast (with indexes).
And it's cheap.You can't run cloud with 64 clustered AS/400's.Because it needs to scale further.And it has a traditional database.It's expensive (very expensive).It's a black box and for a real cloud infrastructure such as Google's you need lots of monitoring for example, at the most detailed level, such as I/O rates between processor and memory, fail rates (processor/memory/disk), etc. Google has therefore their own linux version, customized for this. And their own scalable filesystem GFS, and their own scalable database, etc.Cloud is a completely other ballgame. Using AS/400 to do that is silly.

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:04:44 -0700
From: nandelin@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx

My brother is the IT Director at The Washington Post. When he asked my opinion
about cloud computing, I raised the objection about trusting a 3rd party with
your data. He replied that he didn't have a problem with that, AT ALL. That
can be addressed by contract. I began changing my mind about cloud computing.
I'm reading the book Thinking of Offering a Cloud Solution? by Ian Gotts and
Stephen Parker.

Okay, so some people don't trust banks. And they hide their "valuable" money
under a mattress. The majority however realize that it's too expensive and too
complicated too insecure set up their own bank, and to offer a comparable level
of service that financial institutions offer. How is your HA / DR
infrastructure?

I was just getting into computing when companies began leaving EDS, in favor of
on premise servers. I agree that the AS/400 rode that wave. But now, fiber
optic networks are popping up all over. And users are doing and expecting more
and more from mobile devices. It's a different world. And cloud computing will
play a big role, I think.

I do believe that IBM i on Power Servers offer the BEST architecture for cloud
computing. Server farms won't cut it. Facebook has a problem. They partly
addressed it by transforming their PHP scripts to C, and compiling them. But
then it took something like 9 months to deploy them across tens of thousands of
servers. IBM's answer, coming soon, will be 256 core Power servers, and an
operating system that actually understands how to manage workloads on a
centralized server.

-Nathan.

----- Original Message ----
From: Bob P. Roche <BRoche@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, July 29, 2010 7:17:55 AM
Subject: RE: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG

But "cloud computing" or "utility computing" or "software as a service",
are all the same thing. This was done in the past. Companies couldn't
afford computers and bought time on them. then things got the to point we
could control our own data. I agree that a percentage of the market will
go to Some server farm owned by someone else, But with the security
problems, and rules governing how data must be controlled. Some companies
are still going to find it easier (safer) to keep that control themselves.
They already have the infrastructure so why throw it away and trust
someone else with your companies private information.

You said "learn from history don't repeat it." But, whatever you want to
call cloud computing, it's still just buying time on someone else's
machine. Looking back in history, it's been done, should we repeat it?

--
This is the RPG programming on the IBM i / System i (RPG400-L) mailing list
To post a message email: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/rpg400-l
or email: RPG400-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l.