Utility Computing

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Utility computing is a business model whereby a service provider makes available computer resources to their clients and charges them for the usage rather than the hardware. Like you pay the gas company or the electric company for its service based on usage, computing resources are metered and the user charged on that basis. Utility computing is also sometimes called On Demand Computing, or less commonly grid computing.

History

Utility computing is not a new concept but has a long history. It was first described as:

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:

Cluster Resources, Inc.'s Moab Utility/Hosting Suite
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 [link] http://www.network.com - Pay by the CPU hour

External links

Technical documents

[Australian GRIDS Lab's] Report on - [Utility Computing and Global Grids]

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