The Issue:

The history of computing shows several major architectural changes, most
of which were quite clear and easy to discern (or is that just 20-20 hindsight?).
Today it seems a lot harder to discern what the next computing architecture will
be, but in fact the trends are all pointing in the same direction.

Looking back we see that mainframe computing was partially eclipsed by
client-server computing and then n-tier web architectures. Partially eclipsed,
because no part of computing history ever disappears. Any sufficiently large
computing organization is a bit like a museum: you will find different stages of
history preserved on the pragmatic basis of “if it isn’t broken, why fix it”.
Mainframes still abound, client-server is king and n-tier web is growing in leaps
and bounds. So what is the next-generation computing architecture?

Puzzlingly, if you look at the data center today, it almost seems like we are
trying to re-create the mainframe from distributed components - on-demand
computing, provisioning and orchestration, scheduling and coordination - all
these activities seem to be attempts to build a data-center-scale mainframe. But
at the same time, computing within the data center could not be more
distributed. Far from consolidating computing onto bigger and bigger CPUs, we
seem to be moving to plug-and-play blade servers.

Read this Issue Paper:

Clients - Next Generation Computing Strategies

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