A New Departure For Us: Cloud Computing

[soveryapt]

This is all why maybe and in house solution that you allow access to the outside world using whatever secure method you choose to do that, that way the only problem if you lose internet connection to the school or something is that staff can't access their files from home, but all the stuff is still accessible in school.

 

Another option would be to have a dedicated server space in the "real world" that you can mirror your internal solution to thus if your internet does die, people have access to an external version of it to the latest update, obviously, something like that starts getting rather expensive as you need custom rack solutions not just off the shelf rack hosting, but it would provide a good backup and you would have the best control for it.

[dhicks]

something like that starts getting rather expensive as you need custom rack solutions not just off the shelf rack hosting

 

You don't, neccesarily - if you have your all your servers in in the same VM as your cloud providor then you can move / duplicate VMs between local hardware and a remote cloud as you like. This is why I like Xen - same format as Amazon's cloud service.

 

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David Hicks

[soveryapt]

You don't, neccesarily - if you have your all your servers in in the same VM as your cloud providor then you can move / duplicate VMs between local hardware and a remote cloud as you like. This is why I like Xen - same format as Amazon's cloud service.

 

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David Hicks

 

Should of been clearer .. I meant if you wanted a full control of the source and functionality .. but yeah, you could do it that way too ..

[dhicks]

Should of been clearer .. I meant if you wanted a full control of the source and functionality

 

Sorry, not quite with you - the source and functionality of what? You wouldn't have any say over what hardware your VM runs on in Amazon's cloud, but the whole point of virtual machines is that they run on large, generic servers and get assigned processor/RAM/disk resources as needed.

 

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David Hicks

[BromcomPublicRelations]

DOS applications under Windows = Windows Applications under Cloud

 

In 1990s when Windows replaced DOS, some software vendors tweaked their DOS applications to sell their DOS application under Windows without true benefits of Windows GUI, multi-tasking, multi-threading and host of other underlying features etc..

 

Now 20 years on, in 2010s Windows suppliers will be trying to repeat the history and sell their Windows based applications with terminal services under browser without the true benefit of the Cloud and at the expense of performance, higher server costs, flexibility, dynamism, larger carbon foot-print and underlying host of features etc...