Utility computing
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Utility computing is a business model whereby computer resources are provided on an on-demand and pay-per-use basis.
This is different with the conventional computing model in that customers do not have to invest in owning (peak need) resources anymore, but only are billed for the actual use of resources. As the utility computing provider can spread the customers' variance in resource needs, the utilization of the resources can be optimized. This is comparable to the use of electricity, gas, and most other utilities, hence the name utility computing.
As the Utility Computing service is based on usage, computing resources are metered and the user charged on that basis. Utility computing is sometimes also called On Demand Computing.
History
Utility computing is not a new concept but has a long history. It was first described as:
If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.
— John McCarthy, MIT Centennial in 1961
IBM conducted this kind of business offering computing power and database storage to big banks from its world wide data centers. As Intel increased the desktop power, the computer architecture has gone through terminal/mainframe, client/server, brower/middleware. Recently, it was re-initiated by Sun offering the Sun Grid service to consumers in 2000. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Since 2000 many important computing companies have entered the market, but there have also been smaller organizations that have used utility computing. Some of these organizations use utility computing to help offset the cost of their own hardware, others use it to share the cost of resources within organizations. In December 2005, Alexa launched Alexa Web Search Platform, a Web search building tool for which the underlying power is utility computing. Alexa charges users for storage, utilization, etc. There is space in the market for other niche applications powered by utility computing.
Enabling Utility Computing
HPC organizations have multiple options for enabling utility computing at their own organizations. Software solutions include:
- Various Veritas solutions
- Platform’s Enterprise Grid Orchestrator
- Egenera’s BladeFrame
- Cassatt Collage
Similarly, Utility Computing is available in the form of pay-as-you-go hosting services for developers - these differ from most offerings in that there is no fixed monthly fee:
- Amazon S3 - Bulk storage and bandwidth for static content
- NearlyFreeSpeech - Pay as you go web hosting for web pages, dynamic content, domains, DNS, etc
- Sun Microsystems Sun Grid - Pay by the CPU hour
- Strikeiron Web Services Marketplace - Pay per Web API call.
External links
- Technical documents
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