Question

Explain when an organization might choose to move to a distributed system. What are the costs and benefits from moving to such a system?

Answer 1

When an organization might choose to move to a distributed system? Organizations which expand more branch locations in an industrial area or IT Park running for acres or having more branches in a city or state or globally may move towards a distributed system. • For example e commerce portals which expands its facilities in globally or social networking sites relying on globally distributed datacenters which are highly dependent on centralized U.S data centers, in which scalability, availability, openness, reliability and security are the major System requirements. • Distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a single coherent system. Availability of availability of powerful yet cheap microprocessors related to PCs, workstations, PDAs, embedded systems, etc and continuing advances in communication technology will push the organization towards the distributed systems An important goal of a distributed system is to make it easy for users (and applications) to access and share remote resources. Resources can be virtually anything, but typical examples include peripherals, storage facilities, data, files, services, and networks, to name just a few. There are many reasons for wanting to share resources. One obvious reason is that it is cost effective. For example, it is cheaper to have a single high-end reliable storage facility be shared then having to buy and maintain storage for each user separately.

Cost benefits in moving to distributed system Since distributed systems provide massive scalability, reliability, high performance, and specifiable configurability capabilities are provided at relatively low costs compared to centralized systems. Resource sharing saves more costs like unit costs, maintenance costs and operating costs. • Distributed systems are much more cost effective compared to very large centralized systems. Their initial cost is higher than standalone systems, but only up to a certain point after which they are more about economies of scale. A distributed system made up of many mini computers can be more cost effective than a mainframe machine. • The benefits are more in making collaborative business decisions and more customer satisfaction and archives business growth and gains profits as it helps in getting high return on investments due its more advantageous features