Cloud Computing: One enterprise tech trend to rule them all
June 30, 2014
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.
Recently I was asked what I thought was the most important trend in IT. And it wasn’t hard to answer: The shift from proprietary, scale-up systems to commodity, open source, scale-out systems. NoSQL databases provide a good example of scaling out versus up. To beef up Oracle or any other conventional, proprietary RDBMS, you need to scale up the database server with more cores, more caching, more flash, and so on. At a certain point, you’ll need another server, which means you’ll be saddled with sharding the database and maintaining it in that state (yes, you could use Oracle RAC, but that’s another story).
With a NoSQL database — and all the major ones are based on open source — you scale out when you need more performance or capacity. Instead of powerful database servers than can never go down, you deploy a NoSQL database across commodity servers in a distributed architecture that permits failure of individual nodes. A popular analogy uses "pets versus cows" to illustrate…
Powerful scale-up servers are like pets: You spend time and money to keep them happy and healthy. Scale-out commodity servers are more like cows: When they die, that’s just part of the business, which does not suffer when Bossie goes belly up…
See more at: http://podcasts.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/one-enterprise-tech-trend-rule-them-all-245245#sthash.RY1fjf7m.dpuf