Think of on-demand computing and you might think of application
service providers or grid computing. But there is a new contender
on the block, as Mark Vernon finds out
Today's server infrastructures are a mess. So says a new report
from Forrester entitled The New Computing Utility. The report says,
"Look around your company. The aftermath of the e-business boom
isn't pretty." But although the report goes on to point out that
network administrators are not getting any money this year to tidy
up, the deeper point is that mere server aggregation would not
solve the problem anyway.
Servers are required to handle huge peaks and troughs in demand.
But catering for occasional peaks, as companies must, is expensive
and inefficient. So Forrester turns to a different idea, one that
is gaining favour in many circles. Computing as a utility. In the
same way that you plug into mains electricity and are billed for
what you use, so utility computing is computer capacity on demand
and - the critical second condition - utility computing is pay for
use.
It sounds like a good idea. It would be economical, efficient and
effective. However, whilst proponents point to a number of similar
delivery models already available in support, such as application
service providers (ASPs) and grid computing, utility computing
proper is some way off. Indeed, sceptics wonder if it will ever
truly materialise.
"I have doubts whether it can ever be done," says Michael Hjalsted,
marketing director at Unisys. He points to the fact that utility
computing relies on a universal agreement of standards, ubiquitous
broadband and other kinds of high speed connectivity such as
Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet, and the end of platform dependency
which IT suppliers have a great interest in preserving.
Customer demand
"That is why you hear people saying we
can do utility computing, but you have to buy it from us," Hjalsted
says. It is not that he does not recognise the benefits. But the
only force he can see that could realise utility computing in time
is demand. "Pressure from customers would bring utility computing
about, if anything," he says. But even then he believes it will be
five years before utility computing proper appears.
However, Hjalsted's voice is relatively rare amongst IT suppliers,
all of which are pushing utility computing, if admitting it is not
quite with us yet. For that reason there is still some jostling for
thought leadership.
As mentioned previously, a number of IT suppliers are talking about
utility computing as a development of ASPs or as part of their grid
computing initiatives.
"In some respects, utility computing could be viewed as a
traditional bureau service or ASP depending on your viewpoint -
end-users buy time on an external supercomputer to run some
particular problem," says Bill McMillan, senior technical
consultant at Platform Computing.
"But from the user point of view, this approach is not transparent
because it is clear that they are running an external system. What
you really want, from a supplier viewpoint, is to have a pool of
resources that are automatically and transparently allocated to
people when they need them and to be able to have detailed
visibility into the use and trends of these resources for
accounting and capacity planning."
That is not possible now. Indeed, many companies are sceptical of
the ASP model. Which is where grid computing - companies looking at
sharing resources within organisations - comes in. "Two or more
groups within the same organisation can share the extra capacity,
while maintaining autonomy, as required with the appropriate
chargeback and controls," McMillan says. "The same idea can be
applied to geographically dispersed sites, so while the US sleeps,
the UK can make use of its computer power."
A growing number of global companies are making use of this
enterprise grid computing to deliver computer power as a utility to
their global workforce.
A slightly different line is taken by Sun that is focusing instead
on a shared risk concept associated with supplying computer
services. This is different because instead of saying utility
computing is about satisfying immediate demands - such as plugging
into electricity as and when - it says that supplying business
computing is in fact no longer short term but needs to be seen from
the perspective of longer term relationships.
So, whilst utility computing gives customers the option to pay for
the computing power they need, "utility computing requires
suppliers to back up their proposed solutions by being prepared to
take a short-term hit on profitability to help the customer and
build a long-term relationship," explains Mark Lewis, datacentre
server product marketing manager at Sun Microsystems.
Neil Brooks, UK marketing manager, Interliant, agrees. "The utility
supplier has invested in highly reliable systems, networks and
processes to ensure that the end-user can rely on their IT systems
to be available for use at any time," he says.
Forrester, for its part, has a different term again - fabric
computing, defined as a computing model that provides utility-like
processing power on demand using a non-proprietary high-speed
network. But regardless of terminology, Forrester also make the
point that utility computing will not be with us for some time,
though as the Galen Schreck, author of the report says, "The voyage
begins today."
So what steps should companies be taking if they want to set off on
this trip? Firstly, Schreck says, when renewing or purchasing new
servers, make the most of the technologies available today that
mimic utility computing ideals. For example, whilst many servers
are designed to be scaled horizontally - adding new instances of
them as demand requires - it is expensive and labour intensive. In
the case of storage, firms should stop buying direct-attached
storage in favour of networked storage which allows them to
virtualise storage resources alongside processing capacity, not
conflate the two - making way for utility services when they
appear.
By late 2003, Schreck predicts some suppliers will start shifting
fabric computing-based boxes, but they will still be dedicated to
particular applications. Not until 2006 will fabric computing start
to look generic, and even that is not utility computing proper.
Hjalsted's scepticism for now seems about right.
Why do organisations need utility computing?
"When
companies were experiencing or preparing for a substantial period
of growth, their approach was to throw technology at the issue and
not to worry about the cost," says Bernard Tomlin of HP Consulting.
"Unfortunately, although they projected further growth, it did not
always materialise. The repercussion is that many now feel they
were burnt by that provision of overcapacity. It is insane and many
organisations know it and feel how much it hurts, but to date they
haven't had any other way to do it," he says.
"The point is they need to be able to respond much more dynamically
to changes in their business environment. However, today,
over-provisioning is not an option. You cannot have maybe 14 Web
servers hanging around just in case, when all you need most of the
time is eight.
"The same principle of unnecessary redundancy applies to disk and
network capacity too. Utility computing allows disk, server and
network capacity to be added from anywhere within your data centre
in just a few seconds. It allows resources to be borrowed from
applications that only run in the day and use them for other
systems at night.
"However, current IT architectures are too rigid for this kind of
flexible reallocation. Most network resources are dedicated to
specific applications or functions. That is why a new computing
model is needed, one that reconfigures resources on the hoof.
"Utility Computing is thus a way of linking computers over a
network to pool processing power, and like an electricity
generator, provide the resources an organisation needs as it needs
it."
Why utility computing is not an ASP
Utility computing
is not to be confused with ASPs or grid computing, explains Wendy
Currie, professor and director of the Centre for Strategic
Information Systems (CSIS) in the Department of Information Systems
and Computing at Brunel University.
"Utility computing offers firms the benefit of paying for their
software applications on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than the
traditional software license plus maintenance contract," she says.
"The early ASP market failed because it tried to lock customers
into signing long-term, three-year deals which went against the
utility computing model. If utility computing is to succeed, the
customer will only sign up for short-term deals, such as paying for
cable TV."
However, if it happens, utility computing will appeal. "The
business benefits are about paying for software applications on a
flexible rather than fixed model," Currie says. "Suppliers need to
address the fact that many small- and medium-sized enterprises do
not have experience or a history of IT outsourcing. They therefore
need to sell services which offer real benefits, not just
collaboration tools on a hosted model." She points to three key
areas which suppliers need to concentrate on if utility computing
can be made to work:
- Scale - how many customers they can practically target?
- Scope - what type of applications they should be offering under
the model?
- Integration - how applications can be integrated across
business functions.
"The early ASPs failed to address this and ended up offering not
one-to-many applications but same-for-all," says Currie.
How would utility computing work?
In the same way that
it does not matter to the user which generator produced the
electricity, utility computing aims to free processing power or
access to applications from any particular computer. Data
processing or applications need to be unlocked from any physical
machine and become part of a network. What is more, because this
network is too expensive for one firm, even one service provider,
to maintain - since it is not optimally utilised all the time - the
supply of services to the network has to be shared, with payment
for services being made only when used.
As Tosca Colangeli, worldwide director of e-sourcing solutions, IBM
Global Services, explains, the development of key technology areas
makes this possible: the virtualisation of resources, massive
network bandwidth and radically distributed architectures.
Developments in storage technology provide the best example to
date. "Over the past three decades, mainframes have hosted
thousands of virtual servers, while providing extremely high levels
of availability," Colangeli explains. "Sophisticated workload
management techniques allow virtual machines to be created on
demand, guaranteeing each machine a certain amount of resources and
allowing it to use free cycles beyond that level, if any are
available, thus saving much 'white space' - unused cycles procured
for peaks." The result is that an entire server farm of virtual
Linux machines, for example, can fit into a single box, saving on
electricity, network hardware, space, and most significantly,
maintenance costs.
"Likewise, very large storage systems are now delivered with
built-in availability functions normally not found in discrete
server storage," Colangeli says. These devices can be accessed
through different networking technologies, such as storage area
networks and IP networks. "Associated storage management software
allows hundreds of servers to be dynamically allocated storage
'volumes' on these systems, providing users with fast provisioning
of additional space, aggregated storage capacity planning - rather
than doing it on a per server basis - and greatly reduced
operational costs."
If, and it's a big if, this model was generalised across a whole
infrastructure, utility computing would be the result.