[ih] Geek Terminology (was Re: Resource sharing)

[Bernie Cosell]

On 23 Dec 2012 at 16:17, Larry Sheldon wrote:

> On 12/23/2012 3:48 PM, John Day wrote:
> 
> > Even the nebulous use of "cloud" rather than what it is a "data
> > center."  It sounds so much more reassuring that my stuff is just
> out
> > there in the cloud, rather stored with someone else in their data
> > center.  (Even that is a euphemism).
> 
> Of late I have been wondering:  Has that term's definition morphed 
> without me noticing, or did I use it incorrectly back in the day?
> 
> When I was active in networkish stuff in the late 20th century I "cloud"
> was a device (, metaphorical) for talking about entities that could 
> communicate without much caring how the details in the cloud were
> arranged.

I think that the difference is in the software, rather than the hardware. 
Data is *always* stored somewhere.  We have several quite big MySQL 
servers with a lot of data stored in them and in the old-school sense, 
those servers act as the 'data center" for a lot of our applications.

But "cloud" [to me] implies the invisibility of the data center -- it is 
"integrated" with the software on my local system so that (a) it 
*appears* to be local, and (b) I don't really know where it _actually_ is 
being stored.  Neither of those are characteristics of the traditional 
"data center".  Now, on the *other*side*, it is a huge distributed data 
center, but on _my_ side it looks like, well, part of my local system 
that happens not to be local.

  /Bernie\

-- 
Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
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