The Issue:

Like many things in IT, computing architectures seem to be attached to a pendulum: They swing every few decades from centralized to decentralized and back again.

Initially computing architectures were centralized and monolithic. The mainframe contained all the computing and storage to “dumb” terminals, which provided (primitive) interfaces for the user. Networking existed only as a way to connect display devices (terminals) to the compute facilities.

Client-server computing changed all that by distributing the computing resources out to the end users, who now had powerful workstations with sophisticated graphics and local storage. Client-server computing accelerated the development of sophisticated networking technologies such as TCP/IP, which assumed intelligence and computing horsepower at both ends of the network connection, not just one.

Web-based applications and various types of thin clients seem to have pushed the pendulum back to a centralized architecture. In fact, with the emergence of blade computing, clustering and data-center consolidation, it sometimes seems as though we’re headed right back to the mainframe era.
Appearances are deceptive, however.

The current trend for centralization is very different from the past, and the mainframe era is not coming back. A fundamentally new paradigm is emerging, defined by a mix of decentralized resources on a much more fine-grained scale and centralized management -- a mix of past eras which takes the best elements from older architectures.

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