utility computing

Filed in archive Technology on September 22, 2003

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.