ecommerce Hardware Products

The following paragraph describes the birth of distributed computing. A few decades ago IBM, with its powerful mainframes, was the dominant force in the computer industry. Typically, an entire company, or a large department within a company, did all their computing on a mainframe such as an IBM/390. In many cases, multiple companies shared mainframes (known as timesharing).
Eventually other companies like Digital Equipment (now part of Compaq) and Hewlett-Packard challenged IBM. These companies offered smaller, less expensive computer options, but the same design applied, which was all the computing could be executed on a single computer. If you needed more computing resources, you had to perform upgrades on the computer or replace the computer entirely.

Several years ago a number of hardware vendors, in conjunction with operating systems and storage vendors, invented clustering allowing multiple computers to work together so that they look like one logical computer. This enabled companies to expand their computing power by simply adding a machine or storage device to the cluster. As was the case in the past, this computing design was still based on a single computer, albeit now a single logical computer. Companies like Digital Equipment figured they could distribute some of the computing processes over multiple computers. For example, the database could be put on a different computer than the computer that was running the application logic and distributed computing was born.
Fast forward to the 1990s: In the 1990s distributed computing and clustering have become the norms for newer applications. The flexibility to add computing resources in smaller steps, and to manage and optimize a particular computer for a particular function, provided many benefits over mainframe-style computing. The e-commerce architect needs to think of hardware, and all the other computing resources, in a holistic fashion, understanding how today's distributed paradigm provides flexibility and the ability to optimize functions.