The biggest IT buzzword doing the rounds these days is utility computing. And the names in the fray are quite big.
p____p IBM, HP, Microsoft, SUN, Veritas, CA are all in this game with their variations on the vision, with plans to develop IT as just another utility service. This is expected to herald a new era in computing, a shift from the client-server era to optimizing resources and increasing productivity. This could mean reallocating IT resources from where it is excessive to where it is lacking.
p____p Utility computing is meant to help companies and CIOs get the IT services that they require at flexible pricing and also choose the services they would like to use. This pay for usage model will could really help companies with constraints in IT budgeting. As for the pricing, research is reportedly on at vendor companies to decide the pricing models and units of computing usage.
p____p In an interview with ITNation Business Review, IBM India�s MD Abraham Thomas had spoken at length on IBM�s �e-business� on demand. And yes, the big blue is quite a pioneer here.
p____p HP has also unveiled its �Adaptive Enterprises Strategy� as learning from its integration exercise after the merger with Compaq. HP already has its Utility Data Center initiative, which can create virtual data center resources such as servers, networking, storage and applications and allocate them according to the need.
p____p According to the utility model, companies can share the infrastructure resources, including storage,databases,web servers etc. Thus it is different from the ASP model where individual applications are outsourced. It is expected that with time, there will develop a large virtual computing network, over which the IT services such as storage, databases and applications will be made available to customers on demand. Thus a utility computing network could well resemble a grid (network) of shared resources.
p____p The vendors of these services will be able to make money by running these shared resource centers more cost effectively than would be the case with individual companies running their networks.There are many gray areas to this distributed and collaborative model of computing. However, if and when the trend gets established, hardware like desktops, servers etc could be reduced to the status of commodities in a IT grid.