Hi I'm Jeff Wishnie, chief software architect of WyseTechnology. I'm here today to talk about network-centric computing. This is amodel of computing that addresses some of the problems we have with our currentinfrastructure: in particular security, reliability, and maintainability.
Back in the early days, if you're lucky enough to have acomputer, you had a computer, it was a mainframe. This thing sat in the centerof your company and all the computing that you did in your company happenedhere. All your data was here. All your applications were here, and you accessthis through a series of what we call dumb terminals. These were dumb becausethey really didn't know how to do anything other than display some text comingoff the mainframe. The advantage of this model is that everything wascentralized, easy to secure, easy to maintain, and you just didn't have toworry about these guys that were on the edge of the network because theycouldn't do anything. The disadvantage was flexibility, there really wasn'tany.
So moving forward a few year, we come into the world ofclient server computing. In this model, which we're all familiar with today,you have hundreds of powerful and complicated computers sitting on yourcorporate network that are providing most of your functionality as servers.Then you have a series of equally complicated and often equally powerfulcomputers on your desktop. The advantage of this model is it takes thecomputing power and it distributes it through your organization, giving yougreat flexibility to get the work done that you need to get done when you needto get it done. The disadvantage is that its very complicated and that makes itexpensive to secure and difficult to maintain.
This is what brings us to network-centric computing. Firstthing we do is remove the complexity of this desktop workstation and we replaceit with something that we call a thin client. Now a thin client, looks a lotlike this, is something you can think of basically as a personal computer withall the moving parts removed. That includes the physical parts like fans andhard drives which makes the hardware extremely reliable. But it also means moreimportantly all the virtual moving parts. The very complicated operatingsystems and applications, the things that tend to go wrong and keep you fromgetting your work done, those are pretty much removed from here. Instead, whatwe have are very powerful machines with very simple software environments thatare capable of displaying today's complicated applications with very littlesoftware in them. In the center of the network, we replace this mish-mash ofservers with servers tied together by a software infrastructure that allowsthem to on-demand deploy functionality and data to these thin clients. The endresult is you get throughout your enterprise, thin clients that require justabout as much attention as this old dumb terminals with all the power andflexibility from your client server environment. So network-centric computingis power and flexibility with central control.
