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March 31, 2008
Building a Computing Resources Exchange from the Ground Up
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Digital Ribbon CEO Erik Weaver discusses his company's vision to create a pure exchange for computing resources, as well as the fine points of monetizing computing resources, turning a profit in the utility computing space, and what consumer applications might become the next killer apps.
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GRIDtoday: First, what is Digital Ribbon? What kind of service do you provide to customers? Do you host applications, or just offer computing?
ERIK WEAVER: Digital Ribbon Inc. (DRI) is an aggregator of computation resources representing over 10 million monthly core hours; we are the foundation of an early stage exchange for computational resources. Our primary deliverables are computational resources (CR), which consist of computing power, memory, storage, security and bandwidth in flexible volumes.
DRI's vision is to develop into a pure exchange for CR, wherein clients can both list resources and buy resources in a secure standardized environment globally. Our current practices leverage partner companies' resources through a business-to-business model called cogeneration, which sets us apart from EC2 and Network.com. Another variance is each contract allots a predefined amount of time for consulting at no additional charge to ensure a seamless transition to the resource.
Digital Ribbon's clients are very concerned about the nature of the project running on their systems. We do not typically host applications, but we have early on explored hosted products such as Maxwell Render, Blender and Callminer. Hosting applications moves into the next evolution toward products or end-user consumables. Our primary focus is the platform that delivers raw resources that others might use to manufacturer secure consumable products.
Have you ever read “Empires of Light” by Jill Jonnes? One of the fundamental epiphanies or transformations in electricity was the building of the Niagara Falls electrical plant. For the first time in history, vast amounts of electricity were available at affordable rates in varying quantities that could be accessed at a distance. Out of this revolution emerged companies such as Alcoa. The electricity allowed them to run blast furnaces at temperatures and costs that made aluminum cost effective to produce. This mirrors the place in history at which computational resources currently are. Making vast quantities available on demand while leveraging economies of scale to lower cost opens the door to a whole new generation of products once unattainable.
Gt: From where do DRI's resources come? How do you guarantee service levels and availability?
WEAVER: Our resources come from partner companies. Without getting too elaborate, we use a cogeneration model to leverage a varying list of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations looking to maximize system resources return. Basically, we allow any group to register their resource, then evaluate it for output, architecture, bandwidth and SLA compliance. After comprehension of the resource, we attempt to best marry it to potential contracts.
As for the question of SLAs, each resource has a varying service level agreement predefined. There are penalties built into the contracts for failure to meet SLA agreements. Up to this point, we have yet to experience a failure to meet standards, however the bulk of our current clients have mid-level SLAs, not “99.9 percent” contracts. One of our very first jobs had a lightning strike on the facility while running a job, which knocked power out for six hours.
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