How clouds cheat the speed of light
September 6, 2012
Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Editorial Staff.
We are conditioned to expect everything faster, better and cheaper. In short, impatience has become the new 21st century virtue and influences all aspects of business, particularly when it comes to technology. When we switch on our computers, we expect the web page or the video we want to be served up immediately. The arrival of fibre optic network links delivered just that – access to the worldwide web at the speed of light. This opened the door to cloud computing and, with it, high expectations of accessing cloud platforms from any location in an instant.
However, fibre’s ability to deliver at the "speed of light" doesn’t automatically equate to all applications being delivered in this manner. It’s the makeup of the cloud that makes it fast – its location, type and technology dictate whether those pulling down information from the cloud find themselves in the slow or fast lane. So how can organisations guarantee lightening speed access to their cloud-based, business-critical information?…
Location, location, location
Achieving the holy grail of an instant cloud starts with understanding what dictates its speed. The very ability to use the internet as a personal television started with fibre; it is fibre that was capable of transporting 50 times as much data as previous technology by using light rather than electrical waves. Even though data whizzes along at the speed of light, the download speeds between London and Amsterdam and London and New York will always be different. The elephant in the room is latency. From the very first click on a web page, a "three-way handshake" (there, back, there again) ensures two computers are correctly synchronised to exchange data reliably. And, when a file is downloaded, the receiver acknowledges each block of data as it is received safely, allowing the sender to continue…
Read more from the source @ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/sep/06/cloud-computing-speed-light-network?newsfeed=true