My weekend digest of the BW also included the future of technology section. One of the most interesting articles was about utility computing. I had educated myself a bit more here before.

"IBM, for one, is spending $800 million this year on marketing its vision of utility computing, which it calls e-business on demand."

"Everybody agrees there's plenty to be done to make computing less complex and more efficient...Market researchers estimate that most servers are used at only 20% of capacity. New technologies let software programs and the data related to them be routed to different servers, storage devices, or sections of a network -- depending on where excess capacity exists at any moment. There's a minimum of human intervention. Tech suppliers believe they can raise utilization to 50% to 80%, thus requiring less gear."

" Some of the technology is real today. HP sells a product called the Utility Data Center that is essentially a switching device for doling out computing jobs. A customer's entire network is wired to the machine, so an application can be switched to any computer server or storage device on the network. "

IBM has brought the idea of utility data storage to a sellable product already, as another interesting article suggests. The collective bricks as it is called, is a rather doubtful marketing approach for a tens of thousands dollar high tech gear. But it's simple indeed.