CLOUD COMPUTING
THE CURRENT COMPUTE location pendulum has been swinging from a centralised to a distributed model , from the cloud to the edge .
Navigating this state of flux to deliver trusted and useful data from IoT ( Internet of Things ) is a challenge all forward thinking businesses must embrace . Dell EMC ’ s Server Solutions VP Ravi Pendekanti jokes that he ’ s been “ analysing technology advances in the geek world for decades ”. It ’ s this deep , historical insight , going back to the days of the mainframes and all the way up to the latest workloads such as machine learning and deep learning which makes his advice invaluable . Some industry observers suggest the edge will eat the cloud . What does Pendekanti think ?
“ Now this is the beauty of the space we live in . If there is a constant , it ’ s change . Things keep evolving . The workloads of today change to something dramatically different in the future . If you go back to when the mainframes were the epicentre , you had dumb terminals attached to it and you could talk about it as a centralised environment . Fast forward from there and you have a client server environment , which essentially means
you have a distributed environment . Fast forward again and you arrive at a cloud world . For me it ’ s another simple consolidation , and you ’ re in a centralised environment .”
Pendekanti believes IoT is now altering the dynamics of compute location towards the edge and back to a distributed environment . “ So , this is how the pendulum swings , driven by the number of devices out there ( some analysts estimate north of 50bn ).
40 February 2018