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September 24, 2007
On the Origin of Utility Computing
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Although it has been criticized by many analysts and experts who question its overall business model -- often wondering whether mainstream users would ever be comfortable running mission-critical jobs or services externally -- utility computing has not gone away.
In fact, if one were to ask around, he would very likely hear about a wide variety of utility solutions being offered by an equally varied group of vendors. If one were to dig a little deeper into these solutions, he would find that utility computing sure has matured since its early days of A offering B the ability to run jobs on A’s big collection of servers. Truth be told, “matured” might not be the right verb; it probably would be more accurate to say that, like so many technologies before it, utility computing has “evolved.”
And just like looking at the evolutionary paths of species whose current members have branched off into incarnations that barely (if at all) resemble their ancient ancestors, utility computing today takes many, sometimes unrecognizable, forms. However, unlike those species, the various incarnations of utility computing seek to do more than just survive -- they seek to transform the way the world does enterprise computing.
In this two-part series, we will take a look at four distinct utility models, which, although very different aesthetically, all aim to give users on-demand access to needed resources while easing the increasingly cumbersome task of datacenter management. To start, we examine Sun’s Network.com and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), two services that tackle external utility computing in two very unique ways …
Grid Computing for the Masses
Perhaps the most familiar-looking utility model we’ll discuss here, Sun Microsystems’ Network.com offers users the ability to run their compute-intensive applications on the Sun Grid, essentially a Sun Grid Engine-powered datacenter, for the firm price of $1/CPU/hour.
When it launched in March 2006, Network.com users were required to write their own applications to fit the Solaris-based grid, which they could then get up and running via a Web interface. Since then, however, Sun has been tweaking Network.com to make it more user-friendly, most noticeably by adding an application catalog featuring a variety of applications across a range of industries. Customers using these pre-configured applications simply submit their data and the application runs -- there is no need to write or rewrite code to specifically fit the Network.com infrastructure.
While this model has its fans, particularly among traditional HPC users like life sciences and modeling shops, Sun is looking for more users, which just might come thanks to an emerging couple of use cases. According to Mark Herring, director of marketing for Network.com, Sun is seeing increased interest from ISVs looking to leverage the grid’s resources to provide software services to third-party customers.
In some cases, such as with financials services ISV CDO2 and sales performance management leader Callidus, Network.com allows them a relatively inexpensive and simple way to get into the software-as-a-service market without having to host applications on their internal hardware. The formula is pretty simple: customers pay the software vendors to utilize their on-demand applications (generally via a Web portal), which actually are being run on Network.com. A similar model also is being utilized by data management company InfoSolve, who simply uses Network.com as its backend resource center. As of right now, every single data quality service InfoSolve runs for its customers is done on the Sun Grid. Although it is too early to tell, Herring believes this model could mean big business for Sun, as it offers an option for getting general computing ISVs and users on board in a highly transparent manner.
For Sun, though, its aspirations don’t end with a new usage model for Network.com; the company is searching for the elusive “killer app” that will do for on-demand computing what Google Maps did for Ajax. According to Herring, while the near-term goals for Network.com are to bring more applications into its catalog -- particularly in the life sciences area -- the company is hearing “murmurs and noise” suggesting there is a demand for the ability to run non-grid-enabled applications on the Network.com infrastructure, and Sun also is thinking about working development and office productivity tools into the fold.
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