By the way, as far as your comment about 4TB of storage goes......my company has 6TB of cloud storage.
Wait... I have 4TB in a PC under my desk, and I'm supposed to be impressed that your entire company has a total of 6TB in the cloud?
Look, I'll admit to being kinda belligerant here, but that's how I respond to what I think are some pretty far-fetched claims, claims along exactly the same lines which have proven to be wrong many times in the past.
But I've also admitted that I don't fully understand what exactly is being claimed here. To me, a desktop PC is a workstation. We also use them as servers. They're just Dells with as much CPU and hard drive as we can stuff into them. It's still a PC, or a workstation, or whatever; we use the terms interchangably around here. The analysts' "workstations" became laptops years ago, and now they're tablets. But you still need workstations to actually crunch the data.
So help me out. What exactly is "the cloud" of which you speak? I thought it was just storage, but apparently I'm wrong if it can replace actual workstations. And that takes me back to my question: Where exactly does the crunching take place? Does the cloud crunch? Because if not, then you still need PCs.
First of all, I don't think you're being belligerent at all
We're just talking. It's cool, man. I understand that you (and many typical computer users, and even advanced users and enthusiasts) tend to use the term "PC" and "Workstation" interchangeably, but they are really not the same thing. They serve different purposes, generally. Most of the PCs here in our office are equipped with a single mid-level Core i3 or Core i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB SATA-300 hard drive. They are used for a variety of tasks, generally word processing, a bit of spreadsheet work, entering data into our accounting software and internet browsing either for buying stock from suppliers or research, etc. They're fairly light duty machines and so they're equipped accordingly. The typical workstation, on the other hand, is a different animal. These are generally equipped with a pair of Quad-Core Xeon CPUs, a high-end Graphics Card with onboard GPU for rendering 3D models and running program simulations for our Control Systems. Most of these are equipped with enterprise-level storage including either RAID 5 or RAID 10 with 10,000 RPM SATA drives @ 2TB. They cost about 4 or 5 times what a typical desktop costs because of the robust configuration. Our Servers are mostly HP Proliant ML380G7's and other than the SQL Server Cluster, they don't do much high-end processing and are used mostly for storage and security/domain authentication/DNS, etc. Typical Windows Server environment. So, while I do understand how some people use the terms "PC" "Workstation" and even "Server" and visualize one kind of thing, that is not always the case. Especially in a mid-sized enterprise like the one I run here.
So, anyway, to try to answer some of your other questions, I'll take 'em one at a time and let me just qualify this with an acknowledgement that I am not making any claims that cannot be challenged and I am not claiming that everything I am telling you is absolutely 100% the way things will be. A lot of it is conjecture, but it's based on the fact that I am immersed in the industry and it's a big part of my responsibilities as the director of I.T. at this company to be keeping my ears to the ground as they say. Which is why I attend at least two major technical seminars every month. Lately, especially in the last year or so, there has been a rapidly expanding interest in cloud services and consequently, I've attended probably a dozen or so conferences on the topic. That doesn't make me an expert by any means. I'm really just starting to gain a good understanding of how these services work and what the underlying technology is that makes them work. Bu the consistent theme at all of the seminars I've gone to about "Cloud Computing" has been that the desktop PC as we know it today, is very likely to undergo such a substantial transformation in the coming....decade, maybe decade and a half.....that for all intents and purposes, 10 or 15 years from now, desktop PCs will probably be quite rare.
Now your questions:
So help me out. What exactly is "the cloud" of which you speak?
Boiled down to its base, "the cloud" is essentially "the internet"
Here's a video that does a pretty good job of explaining it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu4FYSFeWqgI thought it was just storage, but apparently I'm wrong if it can replace actual workstations.
Well, it has not reached the point where it can fully replace actual PCs and Workstations, but if innovation continues at the rate that it has been going, we're going to be able to do amazing things all in the cloud, and probably all on a small hand-held device that you can plug in to a dock that will functionally feel a lot like a PC but won't really be a PC.
And that takes me back to my question: Where exactly does the crunching take place? Does the cloud crunch? Because if not, then you still need PCs.
It depends on the application. The cloud can do some "crunching" already, for example, that OnLive cloud app that I linked to earlier in the thread:
https://desktop.onlive.com/That application is a "cloud" app that delivers a pretty rich Windows 7 Professional (with Office 2010 and Adobe Acrobat as well) to your tablet device. Some of the processing for that is done by the servers that are delivering the application, some of it is done locally on the tablet.
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