Downsizing: The downward migrations of business applications are often from mainframes to PCs due to low costing of workstation. And also today’s workstations are as powerful as last decade’s mainframes. The result of that is Clients having power at the cost of less money, provides better performance and then system offers flexibility to make other purchase or to increase overall benefits.
Rightsizing: Moves the Client/Server applications to the most appropriate server platform, in that case the servers from different vendors can co-exist and the network is known as the ‘system’. Getting the data from the system no longer refers to a single mainframe. As a matter of fact, we probably don’t know where the server physically resides.
Upsizing: The bottom-up trend of networking all the standalone PCs and workstations at the department or work group level. Early LANs were implemented to share hardware (printers, scanners, etc.). But now LANs are being implemented to share data and applications in addition to hardware.
Mainframes are being replaced by lesser expensive PC’s on networks. This is called computer downsizing. Companies implementing business process reengineering are downsizing organizationally. This is called business downsizing. All this would result in hundreds of smaller systems, all communicating to each other and serving the need of local teams as well as individuals working in an organization. This is called cultural downsizing. The net result is distributed computer systems that support decentralized decision-making. This is the client/server revolution of the nineties
As client/server technology evolves, the battle cry is now right sizing--design new applications for the platform they are best suited for, as opposed to using a default placement.
An application should run in the environment that is most efficient for that application. The client/server model allows applications to be split into tasks and those