The Cloud Does Not Spell The End Of The ServerThe Cloud Does Not Spell The End Of The Server

Offering cheap, accessible hosting, the cloud would seem to make servers superfluous. On closer inspection, it does no such thing.At first you might think that the advent of cloud computing means that you won't need to buy any more servers. Forget it. The cloud is a new phenomenon that will occupy its own niche in the IT ecosystem. It will not replace office servers.

Today, the premiere cloud example is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Anyone with a credit card can use the equivalent of a 1 gigahertz Opteron or Xeon processor with 1.7 gigabytes of RAM, 150 gigabytes of storage, and a 10-gigabyte root partition, running Linux, all for 10 cents an hour, or $2,628 per three years.

Trouble is, you can buy a faster Opteron or Xeon server for less than that, and you'd be saved the 10 cents per gigabyte data upload fee. (Downloading is charged on a sliding scale that starts at 17 cents per gigabyte.) Plus, on EC2, your application has to be running under Linux.

But let's assume you did have an application running under Linux, on one of your office servers. You've refined it to covert files from an old format to a new one. But you have 11 million such files, and converting them using your spare machines will take a month that you don't have.

So you go to EC2 and configure 100 CPU-equivalents for one day, upload the application and files, and the next day you're done. The cost: $240, not counting data transfer fees. (That's what the New York Times did earlier this year, converting a backlog of scanned articles from 1851 to 1989.)

That's the niche the cloud will occupyscaling up existing server applications. But you can't scale what doesnt exist, so you'll still need servers.

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