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An Internet area network (IAN) is a concept for a communications network [1] that connects voice and data endpoints within a cloud environment over IP, replacing an existing local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN) or the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
An IAN securely connects endpoints through the public Internet, so that they can communicate and exchange information and data without being tied to a physical location.
The IAN eliminates a geographic profile for the network entirely because the applications and communications services have become virtualized. Endpoints need to be connected only over a broadband connection across the Internet. Opposed to IAN, LAN interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, a school, a computer laboratory or an office building. The WAN also differs from the IAN, because it is a network that covers a broad area, such as any telecommunications network that links across metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries, using private or public network transports.
Hosted in the cloud by a managed services provider, an IAN platform offers users secure access to information from anywhere, at any time, via an Internet connection. Additionally, users have access to telephony, voicemail, email, and fax services from any connected endpoint. For businesses, the hosted model reduces IT and communications expenses, protects against data loss and disaster downtime, while also realizing a greater return on their invested resources through increased employee productivity and reduced telecom costs.
The IAN is rooted in the rise of cloud computing, the underlying concept of which dates back to the 1950s; when large-scale mainframes became available in academia and corporations, accessible via thin clients and terminal computers. [2] Because it was costly to buy a mainframe, it became important to find ways to get the greatest return on the investment in them, allowing multiple users to share both the physical access to the computer from multiple terminals as well as to share the CPU time, eliminating periods of inactivity, which became known in the industry as time-sharing. [3]
The increasing demand and use of computers in universities and research labs in the late 1960s generated the need to provide high-speed interconnections between computer systems. A 1970 report from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory detailing the growth of their "Octopus" network gave a good indication of the situation. [4]
As computers became more prevalent, scientists and technologists explored ways to make large-scale computing power available to more users through time sharing, experimenting with algorithms to provide the optimal use of the infrastructure, platform and applications with prioritized access to the CPU and efficiency for the end users.
John McCarthy opined in the 1960s that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility.". [5] Almost all the modern-day characteristics of cloud computing (elastic provision, provided as a utility, online, illusion of infinite supply), the comparison to the electricity industry and the use of public, private, government, and community forms, were thoroughly explored in Douglas Parkhill's 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility. [6] Other scholars have shown that cloud computing's roots go all the way back to the 1950s [7] when scientist Herb Grosch (the author of Grosch's law) postulated that the entire world would operate on dumb terminals powered by about 15 large data centers. [8] Due to the expense of these powerful computers, many corporations and other entities could avail themselves of computing capability through time sharing and several organizations, such as GE's GEISCO, IBM subsidiary The Service Bureau Corporation (SBC, founded in 1957), Tymshare (founded in 1966), National CSS (founded in 1967 and bought by Dun & Bradstreet in 1979), Dial Data (bought by Tymshare in 1968), and Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) marketed time sharing as a commercial venture. [3]
The development of the Internet from being document centric via semantic data towards more and more services was described as "Dynamic Web". [9] This contribution focused in particular in the need for better meta-data able to describe not only implementation details but also conceptual details of model-based applications.
In the 1990s, telecommunications companies who previously offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost. By switching traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, they were able to optimize their overall network usage. [10] The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the responsibility of the provider and that which was the responsibility of the users. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.
After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers, which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of their capacity at any one time, just to leave room for occasional spikes. Having found that the new cloud architecture resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements whereby small, fast-moving "two-pizza teams" (teams small enough to be fed with two pizzas [11] ) could add new features faster and more easily, Amazon initiated a new product development effort to provide cloud computing to external customers, and launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a utility computing basis in 2006. [12]
In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, AWS API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. In early 2008, OpenNebula, enhanced in the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds. [13] In the same year, efforts were focused on providing quality of service guarantees (as required by real-time interactive applications) to cloud-based infrastructures, in the framework of the IRMOS European Commission-funded project, resulting to a real-time cloud environment. [14] By mid-2008, Gartner saw an opportunity for cloud computing "to shape the relationship among consumers of IT services, those who use IT services and those who sell them" and observed that "organizations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models" so that the "projected shift to computing... will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and significant reductions in other areas." [15]
In 2011, RESERVOIR was established in Europe to create open source technologies, to allow cloud providers to build an advanced cloud with the balancing of workloads, lowering costs and moving workloads across geographic locations through a federation of clouds. [16] Also in 2011, IBM announced the Smarter Computing framework to support a Smarter Planet. [17] Among the various components of the Smarter Computing foundation, cloud computing is a critical piece.
Now, the ubiquitous availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture, autonomic, and utility computing have led to a tremendous growth in cloud computing. Virtual worlds [18] and peer-to-peer architectures have paved the way for the concept of an IAN.
iAreaNet was founded in 1999 by CEO James DeCrescenzo as a company called Internet Area Network, devoted to providing offsite data storage and disaster prevention before the cloud existed in widely deployed commercial form. It pioneered the idea of an IAN.[ citation needed ] Since then, it has strengthened operations and has made significant investments in developing a powerful infrastructure to provide businesses with an array of technology solutions, including the patent-pending iAreaOffice, which commercializes the concept of an IAN by eliminating the need for traditional LAN, WAN or telephone system for business communications.[ citation needed ]
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The client–server model is a distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, but both client and server may reside in the same system. A server host runs one or more server programs, which share their resources with clients. A client usually does not share any of its resources, but it requests content or service from a server. Clients, therefore, initiate communication sessions with servers, which await incoming requests. Examples of computer applications that use the client–server model are email, network printing, and the World Wide Web.
In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as network computers, or in their simplest form as zero clients. The server does most of the work, which can include launching software programs, performing calculations, and storing data. This contrasts with a rich client or a conventional personal computer; the former is also intended for working in a client–server model but has significant local processing power, while the latter aims to perform its function mostly locally.
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users. It enables multi-tasking by a single user or enables multiple-user sessions.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
In telecommunications networks, a node is either a redistribution point or a communication endpoint. The definition of a node depends on the network and protocol layer referred to. A physical network node is an electronic device that is attached to a network, and is capable of creating, receiving, or transmitting information over a communication channel. A passive distribution point such as a distribution frame or patch panel is consequently not a node.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; Hard-disk(HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
Utility computing, or computer utility, is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing, the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs. Utility is the packaging of system resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service. This model has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire computer resources; instead, resources are essentially rented.
An Internet hosting service is a service that runs servers connected to the Internet, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content or host services connected to the Internet.
A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that into an image creates a virtual appliance. Like software appliances, virtual appliances are intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software.
A clustered file system (CFS) is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system. Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
Distributed networking is a distributed computing network system where components of the program and data depend on multiple sources.
In computing, virtualization or virtualisation in British English is the act of creating a virtual version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage, virtual private server, load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.
Dynamic Infrastructure is an information technology concept related to the design of data centers, whereby the underlying hardware and software can respond dynamically and more efficiently to changing levels of demand. In other words, data center assets such as storage and processing power can be provisioned to meet surges in user's needs. The concept has also been referred to as Infrastructure 2.0 and Next Generation Data Center.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a commercial cloud computing service that provides a virtual private cloud, by provisioning a logically isolated section of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Enterprise customers can access the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) over an IPsec based virtual private network. Unlike traditional EC2 instances which are allocated internal and external IP numbers by Amazon, the customer can assign IP numbers of their choosing from one or more subnets.
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as users hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a private IP subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per user. In a VPC, the previously described mechanism, providing isolation within the cloud, is accompanied with a virtual private network (VPN) function (again, allocated per VPC user) that secures, by means of authentication and encryption, the remote access of the organization to its VPC resources. With the introduction of the described isolation levels, an organization using this service is in effect working on a 'virtually private' cloud (that is, as if the cloud infrastructure is not shared with other users), and hence the name VPC.
Cloud computing architecture refers to the components and subcomponents required for cloud computing. These components typically consist of a front end platform, back end platforms, a cloud based delivery, and a network. Combined, these components make up cloud computing architecture.
Teradici Corporation was a privately held software company founded in 2004, which was acquired by HP Inc. in October 2021. Teradici initially developed a protocol (PCoIP) for compressing and decompressing images and sound when remotely accessing blade servers, and implemented it in hardware. This technology was later expanded to thin clients/zero clients for general Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Teradici's protocol or hardware is used by HP, Dell-Wyse, Amulet Hotkey, Samsung, Amazon Web Services, Fujitsu, and VMware.
The third platform is a term coined by marketing firm International Data Corporation (IDC) for a model of a computing platform. It was promoted as inter-dependencies between mobile computing, social media, cloud computing, and information / analytics, and possibly the Internet of things. The term was in use in 2013, and possibly earlier. Gartner claimed that these interdependent trends were "transforming the way people and businesses relate to technology" and have since provided a number of reports on the topic.