Monday, January 05, 2009
No Machine is an Island - The Strengths of Computer Networking
When I was eleven or twelve years old, my dad taught me to run our nice self-propelled Toro lawn mower to cut our 1/2 acre yard. We always had really nice thick grass and some of the yard was on quite an incline. Now, my dad is a wise person and told me "Let the mower do the work for you" when he saw that I was having some trouble getting the machine to do what I wanted it to do. He saw that I was fighting against the mower. Now, lawn mowers and 85lb boys shouldn't get into fights because lawn mowers tend to win. Once I decided to back off and let the mower do the work, I discovered that mowing the lawn could actually be enjoyable and didn't take nearly as long as it had before.
Now, I find myself in my dad's shoes from time to time when I see people using computers. I see this tendency for people to misunderstand the ability and design of computers to work together. A computer by itself really doesn't do a whole lot other than just idle. I mean, when you buy a computer and just use it for word processing and browsing CD-ROMs, it really defeats the purpose of the computer. Computers are capable of so much more. Even simply attaching it to the "Internet" is really just scratching the surface. People need to "let the machine do the work."
Sometimes when I work with people and their computers, they will comment that they have a document, but it is on that other computer. Drat! So, dejectedly, they fire up the other machine and save the document on some physical device and transfer it to the computer they are working on. This results in several versions of the document floating around. I have to bite my tongue a bit here because this could have easily been solved by networking the two computers and simply accessing the document remotely. When some people see this, they are blown away that they can access something remotely. But, this feature is one of the greatest strengths of computers and the networks that support them.
Sometimes people set up home networks with three or four computers hooked to them. What's funny is that these computers just act as Internet portals, almost completely unaware that other computers exist on the network. Some people will set up each computer with its own printer and gigantic hard drive. That's a waste of money and resources. That's trying to cause the computer to be an island, which it really is not. The strength of the network is that printers and storage can be spread across multiple nodes for simplification and redundancy. The network can act as its own backup. Software packages can be installed that periodically back up files on one computer to another computer in the event that one computer fails.
One really cool thing that I would love to see on my personal network is the thin client concept. This really emphasizes the previously mentioned network strengths by completely removing those big clunky client computers and replacing them with diskless clients that do all their computing over the network. For example, a family could have a terminal server set up that runs constantly. This server would have to be a very fast, powerful machine with lots of storage. Then, each member of the family could have a cheap, simple thin client that boots up very quickly and does nothing more than log into the terminal server. This scenario aleviates many of the problems of conventional "thick" clients that have their own memory, disk storage, processors, etc. If a problem happens, it can be more easily tracked down and resolved. No one would have to worry about their hard drive crashing because the clients have no hard drives. All this is made possible through the network.
So, I hope that I have been successful in illustrating how to let the machine do the work. Computers should not be viewed as isolated appliances for doing mundane tasks. They are high-precision instruments capable of great things. We should never cease to be amazed by what our computers can do. We just need to allow them to do what they are designed to do.
Next: Real computing power: virtualization.
Now, I find myself in my dad's shoes from time to time when I see people using computers. I see this tendency for people to misunderstand the ability and design of computers to work together. A computer by itself really doesn't do a whole lot other than just idle. I mean, when you buy a computer and just use it for word processing and browsing CD-ROMs, it really defeats the purpose of the computer. Computers are capable of so much more. Even simply attaching it to the "Internet" is really just scratching the surface. People need to "let the machine do the work."
Sometimes when I work with people and their computers, they will comment that they have a document, but it is on that other computer. Drat! So, dejectedly, they fire up the other machine and save the document on some physical device and transfer it to the computer they are working on. This results in several versions of the document floating around. I have to bite my tongue a bit here because this could have easily been solved by networking the two computers and simply accessing the document remotely. When some people see this, they are blown away that they can access something remotely. But, this feature is one of the greatest strengths of computers and the networks that support them.
Sometimes people set up home networks with three or four computers hooked to them. What's funny is that these computers just act as Internet portals, almost completely unaware that other computers exist on the network. Some people will set up each computer with its own printer and gigantic hard drive. That's a waste of money and resources. That's trying to cause the computer to be an island, which it really is not. The strength of the network is that printers and storage can be spread across multiple nodes for simplification and redundancy. The network can act as its own backup. Software packages can be installed that periodically back up files on one computer to another computer in the event that one computer fails.
One really cool thing that I would love to see on my personal network is the thin client concept. This really emphasizes the previously mentioned network strengths by completely removing those big clunky client computers and replacing them with diskless clients that do all their computing over the network. For example, a family could have a terminal server set up that runs constantly. This server would have to be a very fast, powerful machine with lots of storage. Then, each member of the family could have a cheap, simple thin client that boots up very quickly and does nothing more than log into the terminal server. This scenario aleviates many of the problems of conventional "thick" clients that have their own memory, disk storage, processors, etc. If a problem happens, it can be more easily tracked down and resolved. No one would have to worry about their hard drive crashing because the clients have no hard drives. All this is made possible through the network.
So, I hope that I have been successful in illustrating how to let the machine do the work. Computers should not be viewed as isolated appliances for doing mundane tasks. They are high-precision instruments capable of great things. We should never cease to be amazed by what our computers can do. We just need to allow them to do what they are designed to do.
Next: Real computing power: virtualization.
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