Utility computing: a dream deferred

Yet Sun also has a few chasms to cross, which is why the Sun Grid still isn’t commercially available. “The goal once we’re out there is to be able to give additional CPU resources to our customers immediately,” MacRunnels says. “That’s a big challenge for us. Right now we know we’re not yet commercially viable, which is why we’re only chasing specific application markets. We need to walk before we run.”

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Charles King, president and principal analyst at market research firm Pund-It, has a rather cynical take on Sun’s offering. “What Sun is selling isn’t really new; it’s been offered by IBM and HP for several years. Sun has simply gotten more specific and done what they do very well, which is simplify something highly complex with a great marketing slogan.”

Most analysts agree that IBM leads the field in offering utility-based services to clients of its On Demand and Global Services departments. “Other companies are wrapped up in the whole notion of access to compute power,” states Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. “But computing power comes in many forms, including not just grids and virtualization, but also more standard forms of hosting. It depends entirely on customer needs, and these change quickly.”

According to Turek, IBM’s On Demand service is all about providing solutions tailored to individual requirements. “Utility should be a base kind of service just like water or electricity. But where those services are rigid, On Demand’s intrinsic value needs to be wrapped up in customer need, and that means exceptional flexibility.”

HP agrees, having coined its service name as the Adaptive Enterprise, but touting the same organic message requiring IT infrastructure that responds to changing business requirements. “We’ve made an announcement on our grid strategy,” says Russ Daniels, vice president and CTO of HP’s Software and Adaptive Enterprise unit, “but that’s really a specialized application. We feel utility computing refers to technology applied to business process.” Today, HP has customers accessing its resources for increased computing power similar to the Sun Grid, but like IBM, it also places consulting, traditional hosting, and even several on-site products under its utility umbrella.

The attractions of utility
Most customers understand the benefits of flexible hosting. But what of the organic, virtualized, self-managing datacenter -- assuming it can be achieved? Forrester sees the grand concept of utility computing as a solution for three key problems: wasteful technology purchases, unnecessarily laborious IT processes, and rigid IT capabilities that by definition paralyze business processes. Nail those three, and you can get a lot more out of its existing resources. The initial investment in provisioning and virtualization eventually justifies itself by reducing capital expenditures, slowing the growth of IT staff, and providing the business with new agility.

Ultimately, a company could run multiple workloads on fewer machines in fewer datacenters, and accomplish this through the use of multisystem architectures such as blade-based systems, clusters, or grids. That’s only one example, of course. Combining that hardware with a reduced number of platform architectures means faster processing, faster reaction time, and less staff training. Such consolidation isn’t a plug-and-play decision, however, but a gradual process that involves evaluating every technology purchase.

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“This is really customer-dependent,” says Ken Knotts, senior technologist at ClearCube, a blade workstation and grid computing vendor. ClearCube is an excellent example of a utility-oriented product offering, because the company manufactures a blade-based workstation system. By pulling workstations back onto a central blade backplane, ClearCube’s utility-style blade system is in a position to meet a variety of challenges that traditional workstations can’t easily handle.

“Because we can reprovision a blade from scratch, drop a user’s personal data and settings on it within 10 minutes or less, we’re in a position to save customers loads of money on large IT support staffs,” Knotts says. The company can also extend its functionality across the WAN. One customer uses the ClearCube system on a LAN during the day for U.S. developers and then opens those workstations at night to developers in India. “Not only is he saving money,” Knotts says, “but he also doesn’t have to worry about his code being stolen because none of the data is in India anyway.”

The ClearCube blade system can also be converted into a grid computing system during off-hours using its fast reprovisioning capabilities coupled with a partnership with Data Synapse, whose GridServer Virtual Enterprise Edition amounts to a software layer that virtualizes application services and manages that process across distributed hardware systems. “To us, utility computing is about creating the interface between a computing device and what amounts to a floating datacenter,” Knotts says. “In effect, you’re clipping the cable between the user and the dedicated local datacenter. A big chunk of utility computing is about creating the technology that takes the place of that cable, and new technologies are bringing us very close to this goal.”

Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester, emphasizes the business benefit. “Organic IT isn’t just about IT being able to respond to business requirements,” he says. “It’s about doing that on the fly.  And the technology you purchase has to manage that using standardization and automation to keep costs low.” The utility computing services being offered by Sun, HP, IBM, and others are simply outsourced versions of this same concept.