Paul, as a network systems professional, specializing in remote network access, I agree with you.
It is true that some companies are already offering online data storage. CompuServer recently announced a data backup service, where data is stored on their servers and they guarantee emergency access to it in case of a customer hardware failure.
It is also true that some large, security-conscious firms (like banks) have constructed their internal networks with diskless workstations, with all programs and data stored on file servers. In those environments, the workstations actually boot from image files stored on the servers. These firms have been using this approach for many years. However, networks constructed on this model are a very small minority, and their numbers are not growing.
I'm sure nobody wants to hear a long discussion about the pros and cons of this approach to networking. But I do want to give my reasons for finding it an impractical model for the average Internet user.
(Sorry, but this turned out to be quite long. I got carried away.)
Somebody posted something about how, if you wanted to use a spreadsheet, you would just connect to say, the Lotus site, and run it from there. Let's think about how that would work.
Lotus would have to build and maintain multiple large file servers capable of supporting tens of thousands of users at a time. Then they would have to make these available over very high-speed connections to the Internet. They'd have to create user accounts for each person who has paid for the privelege of using the latest version of 1-2-3, say. Some sort of security would have to be in place to ensure that "bootleg" users couldn't access the site and run the software illegally. There would have to be systems administrators available 24 hours a day to help out legitimate users who "forgot their password" or had some other access problem.
(warning, switching tenses)
So once they have set all this up, Joe Internerd decides he wants to open a spreadsheet he's been working on. He simply powers up his Ellison 500 and connects right up to the Lotus site. He double-clicks on an animated Icon. After entering his password, the very latest version of 1-2-3 starts loading into his computer's RAM. All six megabytes of it. Remember, that's just the main executable file. There are a number of dll's he has to load, to, before he even gets the main splash screen.
Clearly, dial-up connections to the Internet simply don't make this possible at all. 28.8 modems give us a maximum throughput of 115,000 BITS per second, using compression. A megabyte, as we all know, is a million BYTES. There are 8 bits in a byte. So that means it would take Joe around 3.5 minutes, on a perfect phone line, to download each megabyte of the six megabytes. 21 minutes to start the application. And that assumes that every switch, router, and server he's passing through makes his datastream its top priority.
Hmmm. Joe needs more bandwidth. Will ISDN do the trick? It's better. At 128 kbps raw speed, with as much as 512 kbps possible using compression, it might only take 5.5 minutes to start 1-2-3.
Still not quite there. Cable modems? Sure, at some point. Can't really talk about speeds there, because we're not sure what kind of throughput we'll be able to get when, as Paul pointed out, we're sharing the cable with all the other users on the block. ADSL modems sound more like they'll do the trick, with 128 kbps going upstream, and 6 megabits per second coming back. With ADSL it would only take about 8 seconds to load my program, assuming, again, no other bottlenecks.
(Ethernet? Sorry. Ethernet is designed for local networks, not huge, publicly accessible, long distance ones. It really isn't possible.)
But bandwidth isn't even the biggest problem. Let's say I'm Joe, and I've got ADSL, and 8 seconds isn't too long for me to wait to start an application. (Took only 3 seconds from my own hard drive, but what do I care? I'm a modern guy.) I connect to Lotus, fire up 1-2-3, and now I want to open that spreadsheet of mine. The little one, only two megabytes. Where is it? Is it stored at Lotus HQ? Are they supplying me with data storage space along with my program? Or is it at my ISP's storage bank? Yeah, that's it. No problem. Couple of seconds to download that.
Woops. I just ran out of RAM on my Ellison 500. It's only got 8 megabytes. The OS and browser are in ROM, so they don't matter.
But the 1-2-3 main program, with a couple of dll's took 6.5 MB.
The spreadsheet is 2 MB. I'm 500K short. Gee, if I had a hard drive, I could use it for swap space. Let's assume I started with 16 MB of RAM, then.
So what's going to happen if I want to cut and past information from my spreadsheet to a WordPerfect document. Connect to Corel (!), enter password, download several more megabytes of progam files, etc. Oops. Out of RAM again. OK, I'll need 32 MB.
This is getting silly, so I won't go on. But a couple of questions arise out of this scenario. What does it cost me, per month, to store the few hundred megabytes of my own data files on my ISP's server? I'm assuming that all the security issues have been taken care of, here.
What does it cost every month to maintain access to my Application Providers? Do I have to have a bunch of Application Providers, or can I get everything from one place? If I get from one place, and keep my data all in one place, that place is going to have to have a hell of a huge storage system.
Sounds like mainframes would make a big comeback.
Would it not be cheaper and simpler to just use a hard drive?
Anyway, this is why I don't see personal storage disappearing in the near future.
- Allen |
