I see servers of the future melding with our current idea of network cable. A thinner operating system at the server end, not the client, that provides uniform secure access to persistent storage. That's all a server is anyways, we just need to make it thinner. A very, very rough analogy today would be an embedded system implementation of a web server; servers essentially become intelligent disk controllers. As network bandwidth increases this becomes more of a reality since it is less of a concern about where data is; local and remote are one.
The intelligence to access those devices resides on the end unit our notion of a desktop. This provides for a fault resilient distributed architecture ... and happens to be the most cost effective since the price of desktop power is decreasing as power is increasing.
The desktop is the center of the universe; everything else simply revolves around it. Interestingly this is the opposite to Sun's strategy of Fat server and thin client.
May the battle begin ! |
