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Back in about 1999, I picked up my first copy of Linux, Redhat to be precise, and started playing with it. I don’t remember the full configuration of the machine I had then, but I think it was a Dell with 128M of RAM, what seemed like a screaming hot processor and get this, I was rocking out with a 2M video card. Yeah!
The installation went OK. It was a little dicey, with the bare bones installer, little to no documentation, and my only source of live help, an arrogant little… that is, a confident member of the university user group. In the end though, I got it done, had connectivity, a reasonable set of colors on my 14 inch monitor, and a working mouse. Then I tried to play Yellow Submarine by the Beatles.
What followed was a solid week of installing drivers. Compiling drivers. Rebuilding kernels. Reinstalling the OS. Talking to a guy in Germany at 2AM my time. Bitter tears. Finally, those magic tones drifted out of my $6 speakers and I shuddered, thinking if it was this tough for me, an IT guy, what chance did the average Joe or God forbid, my mother ever have of getting this Linux thing to work?
Fast forward a decade and a year and you would find me tossing a DVD in a cheap PC I knocked together out of the pieces in the bone yard in my basement, answering a couple of questions, and reading a magazine for 15 minutes while Kubuntu Linux installed itself. Afterward, I pop in Yellow Submarine and sing along heartily, much to my darling wife’s displeasure. The system’s sound is perfect; mine is not. What a difference a decade made in the maturity of the OS.
Only a few years ago, the computing cloud was domain of the very few early adopters who could function in the rarified atmosphere, similar to Linux in 1999. Access was difficult and businesses, if they had even heard of the concept, were deeply skeptical, to say the least. Who could really blame them? What kind of foolish idea was it to hand your data to strangers, so those strangers could stream it across the internet, and then store it who knows where? It sounded to most people, one step removed from a Nigerian lottery scam.
Times have changed. Just today at my day job, I sat in on the presentation made by our new cloud storage partner, Nirvanix. [Disclaimer: I am an employee of CommVault Systems and Nirvanix is one of their partners. This blog is not sponsored, approved, or endorsed by either of them. All opinions stated in here are my own.] I was surprised to find out, to our software, the cloud is now just another target device, the same as a disk array, tape library, or WORM drive. The end user doesn’t have to know anything other than how to pick a value in a drop down list of target devices when configuring our software.
The security of the cloud in this case is vouched for by a variety of certifications and audits. You can see the geographical spread of Nirvanix’s data centers and they document the protocols and processes involved in moving the data to and from the cloud, but if you don’t care, you don’t have to read a word of that. You just need to be able to pick a name from a list. Even my mother could do that.
During the one hour meeting, it hit me like a baseball bat. The cloud is ready for primetime. No longer the province of the technological elite, the masses are about to start filling it with persistent, far line data, with no more difficulty than me playing Yellow Submarine. The whole course of IT changed.
Losers? Potentially hardware vendors, traditional backup and data management companies, and anyone who can’t adapt to a rapidly realigning world. Winners? Just about everyone else who has data and is sick of changing tapes, swapping power supplies on Christmas eve, and simply wants the damn thing to work. Me? I’m sort of sorry that people may not quite look at my knowledge of REST, distributed computing, and other cloud issues with quite the same respect, but on the other hand, I could do without those late night hardware emergencies. Oh, and I don’t miss compiling sound drivers either. It’s good to be alive in 2010.
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