Big Guns Launch Utility Salvo

The starting gun has been fired, and IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun are racing toward utility computing by rolling out products designed to give enterprises more efficient computing resources.

Meanwhile, software vendors Computer Associates (CA) and Opsware are joining the scramble by trumpeting new server administration and consolidation tools to ease customers’ transition toward the utility model.

According to Forrester Research, four datacenter innovations — Web services, server provisioning, storage virtualization, and network route optimization — will “recast” datacenter architecture and allow customers to slice IT spending in half.

With that in mind, HP on Tuesday will unveil its Adaptive Enterprise strategy. IBM and Sun last week touted new technologies designed to bolster their utility strategies.

At an event in San Jose, Calif., to mark the one-year anniversary of its merger with Compaq, HP executives will unveil a set of initiatives, including HP software Self-Healing Services and the HP VSE (Virtual Server Environment) solution based on an upgrade to the HP-UX Workload Manager and designed to improve real-time monitoring of resource optimization.

Peter Blackmore, executive vice president of Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP’s enterprise systems group, said the company will offer products “in a more modular way” to help enterprises consolidate datacenter and server resources. HP is planning to introduce a multisystem policy engine that dynamically adjusts system resources based on workload. Also, HP's Self-Healing Services will use Web services to focus on automatic fault detection, reporting and analysis, and collect troubleshooting data and system information, he noted.

IBM said the offerings it introduced last week address the three requirements for a true on-demand environment: integration, automation, and virtualization. More importantly, the new products "map" these capabilities onto shifting business processes and management needs.

"We are in the process of transitioning our customers over to On Demand environments, and these products give them a way to get started [and] a road map on how to do that," said Stefan Van Overtveldt, director of WebSphere marketing at IBM in Somers, N.Y.

Among the new offerings is a set of storage virtualization products, which supplies a single and consolidated view to all critical resources on a network, regardless of where the data resides. IBM also rolled out a WebSphere solution that incorporates grid computing technologies to help virtualize application management. Lastly among Big Blue’s new class of automation offerings is Web Server Provisioning, which allows users to either switch or immediately add another server to increase capacity or optimize resources.

Sun last week detailed a systems-metering piece of its utility strategy that would account for low-usage patterns countered by spikes during peak times. Executive said that Sun is approaching utility computing as a way to pool resources of multiple servers, and its N1 technology will enable such pooling.

Although the vision of utility computing is compelling, challenges abound.