Future with no hard drives?

[Notorious Honey Badger]

So as I was formatting and restoring my computer today I noted that a lot of things I did in the past do reboot my machine are gone by the wayside. A lot of my drivers are loaded by Windows 7, Chrome restores and syncs my bookmarks and plugins to the loud, and thanks to google my calendar and contacts are synced to the cloud too. So this had me wondering about a future with no hard drives, or, small SSD drives just to load an operating system. I wonder if this is where we`re heading, or, will the advance in wired transfer rates always mean that even in 20 years we still have large multi terrabyte hard drives.

[Hack&Lube]

This is called "Thin client" and is how basically how the majority of business/enterprises work with their computers.

Cloud has it's pros and cons. What if you want to watch your favorite movie or listen to your favorite song when the internet is down?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

What if you want to watch your favorite movie or listen to your favorite song when the internet is down?

I'm too busy trying to restore my internet connection or set up an emergency 3G wifi bridge if it goes down - who has time for music or movies?

[Inglewood Jack]

I believe that future with no personal storage will arrive eventually for better or worse (depending on what you think of big companies having all your data) but I'd predict it's still maybe 15 years away at least. Connection speeds have a lot of catching up to do, especially uploads...can you imagine trying to edit a video with some weaksauce 5mbps write speed?

That being said, it's really only an issue for big media right now. You can have all your bookmarks, contacts, and other small files on the cloud with no noticeable performance penalty or hassle. I've been trying to get the Internet to work that way for me for the past 15 years, all the way back to those hokey FTP programs that could map a network drive for you.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Inglewood Jack

can you imagine trying to edit a video with some weaksauce 5mbps write speed?

I sure can - the key is that the machine you are working at is in the cloud as well, and you're just redirecting audio and video and input locally. VDI is making huge strides in delivering rich, real time and low latency remote computing. It's not quite at gaming speeds yet, but for almost everything else it is getting very, very close.

[freedogger]

I think in the short term at least, it comes down to whether you are producing or consuming content.

Producers need some sort of local storage. A scratch drive to speed up workflow. That said, if you are producing anything worth while, you better back it up offsite (aka the cloud).

The cloud isn't going away and what is on or off your computer will become a technical detail that you would only consider if you were into this kind of thing. Quite a few people at corporations probably don't realize that saving something to their personal drive or even their desktop is actually hitting the metal somewhere off their machine.

I hope to build a machine in the near future (1-2 years) that will run the whole os and everything I'm compiling in ram. I patiently waiting for vboot to figure this out for me.

[To Be Quite Honest]

Adobe CS6 is available on the cloud. You pay $50.00 a month to use it instead of the $1900 (Production System), or $2600 (Master Collection) for the programs. A nice deal if you want to upgrade when the new system comes out in 2 years. $1200 is better that $1900.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest

Adobe CS6 is available on the cloud. You pay $50.00 a month to use it instead of the $1900 (Production System), or $2600 (Master Collection) for the programs. A nice deal if you want to upgrade when the new system comes out in 2 years. $1200 is better that $1900.

Is executing in the cloud, or are you just licensing usage monthly on your local machine?

[Inglewood Jack]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

I sure can - the key is that the machine you are working at is in the cloud as well...

oh, yeah guess I forgot the obvious scenario where your client is really thin and not doing anything other than displaying stuff. in that case, this isn't so much future with no hard drives as it is future with no local computer. I wonder then how the business model will work...if I pay enough in subscription fees can I get an entire datacentre's worth of computing power for my own personal use? Imagine how smooth my 8K resolution por...er hockey highlights will look.

[BloodFetish]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

This is called "Thin client" and is how basically how the majority of business/enterprises work with their computers.

Cloud has it's pros and cons. What if you want to watch your favorite movie or listen to your favorite song when the internet is down?

That's a good time to practice baby-making!

[To Be Quite Honest]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Is executing in the cloud, or are you just licensing usage monthly on your local machine?

It looks like you just download the program and license it.

http://success.adobe.com/en/na/sem/p...ite/cloud.html

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Inglewood Jack

I wonder then how the business model will work...if I pay enough in subscription fees can I get an entire datacentre's worth of computing power for my own personal use?

Yup. This is already common practice - it simply hasn't broadly reached the consumer space yet. But it's ridiculously easy to provision capacity on demand as well as meter and bill for it.

[DownInFlames]

Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest

It looks like you just download the program and license it.

http://success.adobe.com/en/na/sem/p...ite/cloud.html

That's exactly how it works. You download an installer on up to two machines and choose which programs you want to install. I've started getting heavy into video, so this is a more affordable way to have legit copies of Premiere and After Effects, along with everything else in the Master collection.

[Shawnski]

I will not touch the "cloud" ever if I can help it. And I am not recommending it in any way shape or form to any clients. It is madness to allow your important information to be held outside your realm and control.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

I will not touch the "cloud" ever if I can help it. And I am not recommending it in any way shape or form to any clients. It is madness to allow your important information to be held outside your realm and control.

You could have said the same thing 31 years ago when the IBM 5150 was introduced and began a massive shift away from centralized mainframes and mini's to micro's. Everybody said the same things, and all the same lessons and rules apply.

Competent technical architecture and staff, strong security compliancy to accepted standards, and the controls in place to monitor and enforce access at all layers, and you have very little to worry about. (well, you have tons to worry about, but the point is you make sure you DO worry about all of them, to the appropriate degree, and action those worries, so they don't become problems down the road)

Miss any of those things, and you do. And guess where you find those things missing in most cases - any organization that doesn't have sufficient numbers of highly trained IT professionals that have a focused mandate to deliver those services in that manner to the business. Which is a lot of them, cloud or not.

In contrast, the security and availability of a cloud provider's infrastructure is their entire focus, because it's all they do - so the ones that are good, and that are going to prosper in a cloud transition, are going to be very good at it.

There will be lots of spectacular failures, just as there have been countless times in the non-cloud space, and it will always boil down to the same thing - a lack of competence, a lack of focus, or a lack of funds to do security properly.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

It is madness to allow your important information to be held outside your realm and control.

More I read this, the more I realize there's a more fundamental point being missed here. You "important information" should be so highly protected that it can be left out in plain sight and be useless to your foes. It should also be distributed, redundant, and self-integral so it can recover from corruption or attempts at manipulation. None of this is truly hard to do with modern systems and technology.

And then it doesn't matter where it's kept.

[freedogger]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

I will not touch the "cloud" ever if I can help it.

You just did.

[Shawnski]

More garbage IT make work projects.

Avoid it at all costs.

This biggest burden I see with companies I talk with are unwarranted IT costs. This is just one of the lot.

Second to Marketting @$$wipes, many IT weenies are the bane to actually running a successful business.

Argue all you want; been there and have the t-shirt.

[Shawnski]

For the record, I have worked with tons of INCREDIBLE IT people. It is just the overall mentallity (like Marketting) that seems to have no connection with reality.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

I will not touch the "cloud" ever if I can help it. And I am not recommending it in any way shape or form to any clients. It is madness to allow your important information to be held outside your realm and control.

I guarantee you that any decent enterprise-grade cloud provider has far more advanced security, encryption, redundancy, and backup capabilities than your organization can do in-house for an affordable price.