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IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility
kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"
Waah! Must find a way to get the world back into the 1960s! Bring back glass houses and lab coats!
It will be a revolution until Linux becomes mainstream on the desktop and every computer on the corporate LAN is part of a cluster, when users log off the computer re-joins the cluster. Companies should look at what they already have before shelling out more money.
If the huge false start that was Application Service Providers showed anything it is that corporate customers don't trust computing resources that are outside their control. It doesn't matter if IBM can provide a better service or a more reliable one, it just doesn't feel that way - and the IT guys will never report favorably on something that will put them out of a job.
It's PCjr, it's Gavilan, it's all kind of failures. And $10,000,000,000!
See, at that time ubiquitous networking was not a way of life. Also, software engineering was not as mature as it is now WRT to virtual machines, encapsulation, OO design, etc.
Of course, all those technologies did exist then, but they can be counted on to be everywhere now. The reason mainframe timesharing gave way to PC's is because PC's could provide a more flexible and convenient sandbox to compute in, rather than the cumbersome interface of working with the mainframe in the company basement.
These days returning to the idea of computing power as a fluid resource is a good idea because the landscape has changed and the world might actually be better prepared to accept the tradeoffs since the tradeoffs are much less significant now.
don't ever let this happen. The car design scenario creeped me out. I work for an automotive supplier, and we ALREADY have to wait in line to use test equipment, testing chambers, etc. I can only imagine the local supercomputing hub monopolizing the speedy machine, creating more lines to wait in, and IBM bringing its supercomputer prices out of reach for anyone but their own subsidiaries to purchase. Could be a disaster, indeed.
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
If this isn't an idea for a killer app, I don't know what is.
With IBM's continuing support of Linux in the commercial and high end server space, I have no doubt that this will be a GNU/Linux friendly project, if not composed entirely of GNU/Linux software.
And just imagine the possibilites for breaking the MS monopoly. I can just imagine companies with hundreds of cheap, dumb, never-needing-to-be-upgraded X terminals connected to this computing "utility" for all their office/CAD/research/calculation/accounting/etc needs.
Why not combine your computing "utility" bill with your software "utility" bill? IBM's supercomputers could always have the latest versions of Sun/Open/IBM/etc office suites. It would be the natural extension of the software subscription model.
This project is going to make MS quake in its boots .
Nowadays the need for computing are everywhere. For instance where I'm studying almost every research group has its own Linux cluster. The use of these hardware comes in burst--often it sits idle, but when it is needed, it turns out to be under-powered. Besides, the maintenance of this machine costs too much man-power and money. After a couple of years/projects, these machines go out-of-date anyhow. Of course any given lab could always negotiate the use of supercomputers at large research centers, but IMHO having the infrastructure in place will be very useful.
The last 35 years development in computers were precisely to move away from the "metered service" model which made IBM's fortune.
On will recall that IBM's data-processing customers since the 1920's were charged by units of information stored/processed by the way of forcing customers to buy Hollerith (punch) cards solely from IBM, and run them in rented machines whose rental price was directly proportionnal to the throughtput of those (a card reader that processed 600 cards per minutes cost twice as much as one that processed 300, yet the only difference was the size of the pulley off the main motor - and you could upgrade by having an IBM tech that came and changed the pulley for a bigger one).
So is it that the ghost of Thomas Watson sr has made a comeback to IBM's board of directors????
We had metered cpu usage at college. It was a constant, annoying nightmare. Though the "money" was supposedly "fake" to students, you had to beg the admin assistants in the CS department to get more when your account ran low. The administrators of the Computer Center claimed it was actual money charged to each department. The school also gave out free accounts to students with small money allocations in them which gamers borrowed and stole to play GalTrader on the VAX.
I thought it all went away until I started working for IBM. Every time you log out of the mainframe the computer told you how much money your session cost the company. That turned out to be real money that was charged to the department you worked for. We eventually reverted to using X Terminals connected to massive, rack-sized RS/6000 machines instead of the mainframes after that.
Kris
Kriston
No, it's an Application Service Provider, the next step in outsourcing. The idea wasn't all that popular during the dotcom craze; is it any better now?
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
PCjr
I don't know what everyone is comlaining about. Take a look at the wonderful user-oriented, monopolistic services companies like the Phone and Cable companies currently provide (Qwest, Verizon, Cox, etc). This is a terrific model to emulate. And think of all the lovely intelligible Taxes the government could add to your monthly computing bill.
0xfeedface
The problem is that most reasonably sized departments need an IT staff anyway. Having them run a mail server or the like isn't that big a deal. While some things can be effecient to subcontract out (i.e. your web server) often it is easier to have it on sight.
There are exceptions. But I think that only a few IT functions really can reasonably be marketed out. I think IBM's marketing strategy will work - but only for a small niche.
What IBM has said is that it hasn't got anything new to report but that its still here. If you look at their figures $10Bn works out at 3.5bm for the consultancy firm they purchased, a few billion for Grid computing, and I guess a couple of billion for linux. With a bit of spare change for research.
Why are they doing this? My guess is that CFO's keep complaining about the cost of computing resources. A multinational with 10,000 desktops still has to ask for clusters and supercomputers for serious work while TFlops of processing are sitting idle on the secretarys desktops. Hard Disks, which used to be able to just about hold the OS, Office suite and files now have 10's of GBs of wasted storage.
If you're serious about using computers you want to use resources efficently. And from IBM's perspective so how does this idea sound ...
IBM sells computers to a firm, it then sells the software to turn all their hard disks into a P2P file storage system so that you never lose that important document ever again. Instead of a new cluster - set all the desktops to process data overnight as a massivly distributed system. (using IBM software), installed by IBM engineers under the direction of their new consultants. And of course the only real option for this is Linux.
A single, nice, neat package. A single point of contact and massive economies of scale. Now assume that their contract allows them to use/sell spare cycles and their revenue stream suddenly improves a lot.
With the millions of PCs sitting around with "Idle" as the busiest process, imagine getting a penny or so per CPU second, selling CPU time on the open market to the
Now, you have a value for CPU time on the open market. You should be able to
For a reference of a future society that uses this, see Greg Egan's "Distress" and perhaps "Permutation City"
Design for Use, not Construction!
"The concepts of grid computing are not entirely new or unique to IBM. Hewlett-Packard Co. is pursuing similar ideas, for example." The original submission asked if this would "revolutionize" computing. I doubt it. This is one large company trying to react to another large company. For a company who outsources IT, this might be desirable. I don't think this would be good as a home computing model. However, as someone once noted "There's a sucker born every minute."
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
with a pre-determined rate, IBM would have to build a lot of capacity to satisfy the peak demand times, but then they would have all that power sitting around unused when demand dies down. people who choose to use cpu cycles during off hours will end up subsidizing the peak demand users.
if IBM charged based on current demand, they wouldn't have to build up as much capacity because people would smooth out their usage to take advantage of cheaper prices during odd hours. before you submit a job, you could check and see what the current rates are, and also look at historic rates to try and predict a cheaper time to run your job.
sounds a lot like the arguments for running electricity markets...
The revolution will be in revenue.
Currently IBM big customers buy a new machine every four years or so, they pay a yearly maintenance bill. IBM has trouble predicting it's revenue quarter to quarter, in a downturn everyone stops capital expenditure and IBM mainframe sales plummet.
Under this model everyone should pay less but they'll pay every month like clockwork.
Computer Associates has a similar scheme for software. You rent your software on a monthly basis.
On a technical level I'm all for it. I have a suite in my current site that is run yearly and takes for ever. Currently IBM has a big box sitting here and we just sip from it, until year end when we max it out for like two weeks. Let me rent time on a huge box and I'll be happy. Gurantee my data and response time and I'll be ecstatic.
Bad news: the rates charged per byte/cycle/whatever ought to drop by 50% every generation (12-18 months these days).
More bad news: typical supercomputer code is usually bummed (at least a little) for the particular hardware it runs on, to get the last factor of two or so for performance. If you rent crunchons, can you afford to rent generic crunchons and give up that last bit of optimization?
Good news: if you can get around the bad news above, this could turn supercomputing into a lease-vs-buy situation, and when the computer you buy essentially depreciates 50% every generation, leasing might be a win.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Scientific and engineering computing really needs this. Maintaining large server farms must surely be cheaper, for the same computing power, than keeping isolated supercomputers close to where they are needed. And as the amount of computing power on the grid increases, the time you have to wait for a computation to finish will decrease.
The problem, of course, is security. Companies would be very nervous about putting valuable data on a shared server. For example, the data required for a computing task might include the geometry of a machine part or the chemical structure of a drug. The algorithms used by the software being run might also be proprietary. It's even a problem in academic computing because researchers still patent their discoveries or compete to be the first to publish a particular result.
Just how much can you trust IBM? And if the grid becomes open, with multiple companies offering their computing resources, the problem is even worse.
I know people who have generators or windmills and are connected to the electrical grid. When power demands are high, the power company actually pays THEM for their surplus power.
If I have a nice Linux cluster that meets the "standards" for the grid (whatever they are), can I sell cycles back to the provider? Or is it just one way, in which case I'm trapped into doing whatever the grid wants me to do.
This would (did) work in the early days of computing, when it was virtually unheard of for anyone except for large fortune 500 companies and the US gov't to have access to computing power.
Why would anyone be tempted to return back to this model? How many sub $500 or even sub $200 dollar computers, will it take for IBM to realize computing power isn't rare or expensive?
And if a company or organizaion needs incredibly massive computing power is needed then can turn to companies like this to provide the solution, again using cheap generic pcs.
To some it all up this is stupid, and now Palmisano looks like another idiotic buzzword chanting CEO. This will be yet another blow to IBM, and it will soon (IMHO) join the growing stable of companies (Compaq, HP and the "new" Cisco) that have been screwed by a clueless greedy CEOs. Somebody needs to cancel his subscription to Business 2.0
They'll charge you for the connection that you require. Same as if you want a faster line from your telco or cableco.. Leased lines, etc.. IBM's in every mid to large size city. Fast transfer rates could likely be accomodated.
2. Dependency - you rely up on natural gas and electricity to be there, and yes they go down, but can they guarentee their utility won't have worse problems - especially if its Windows run and goes down once a week, cutting into your bought utility time.
Safely assuming that this would all be running IBM hardware and operating systems (S/390, AIX, OS/400 on their respective machines), downtime would be best the least of your worries... These are all workhorses that can run forever* IBM has the most experience that I know of running large application servers (mainframes) for many large clients.
3. Regulation. Most utilities are regulated, and those that were deregulated have not always worked out for the consumer. Let's say company A gets rid of its expensive infrastructure for computing resources and uses IBM's utility. What if IBM becomes the only utility and charges way more than it should - there's no competition so Company A can't shop around. Along this same vien, if Company A is smart enough, they'll never enter into a utility agreement with IBM if they can generate their own computing cycles and be sure that they'll always be there, versus putting all their eggs in one basket.
Company A can go back hosting its own apps.. as opposed to you or I who can't start digging for natural gas.. well, legally anyhow...
I'm not a huge IBM fan, but it's hard to dispute their capabilities for doing this kind of work.
In some organizations and especially in Canadian Universities where the funding simply isn't there to establish a supercomputing infrastructure (an article last week referred to a University in the Southern USA that had greater supercomputing capacity than all of Canada) the ability to purchase computing power on demand will probably be of great interest to Academics and medium to small sized businesses.
But the money for IBM wouldn't just be in the sharing of the computing power.
Say that Company A lacks the programming staff to develop a program for assessing the success of their Oil drilling or other geological analysis they need to do. What if IBM developed the custom program on behalf of the company and as well sell them the CPU time to run it. Would be a great way to increase their Consulting business and this one simultaneously.
I think it will be a very successful business model.
I'm also curious if it might on the whole reduce the power consumption of Server-Farms as fewer would be needed if IBM had a number of them prebuilt and ready to serve up power. I would imagine that a number of Hollywood studios might prefer this model to constantly upgrading their own server farms.
As for implementation of the communication end of things something like CANET:
CANET3 would probably fit the bill.
As long as they keep it within reasonabl bounds.
People do not want "shared computing"; they do not want to put their data on "borrowed computers" nor do everything on "rented computing power" or "rented space". IBM should realize that most people will still want their applications and most of their processes and files on their own computers.
What IBM should be offering -- and what it seems like they're offering -- is loaning supercomputer time to people (for a price) for specific tasks which they can't accomplish in a reasonable amount of time on their own computers. This is a reasonable and useful idea; however, it is hardly new at all. At the University of Rochester, there are shared computers within biology labs, where people dump some heavy-duty computing operations and pick them up later. This went on during the 60's when computers were so expensive no-one could afford them. In short, this is hardly new nor revolutionary, though IBM may be putting a new twist on it by trying to use it as a business model.
It makes sense. After all, most people don't need supercomputing power for the majority of their tasks; why spend money on a supercomputer when it'll be unutilized 90% of the time? But what IBM can do is maximize supercomputer utilization by selling a percentage of its resources to various customers; these customers save money because they pay on a per-need basis.
For example, I often run Bayesian phylogenies. Recently, I ran a Bayesian phylogeny with about 50 taxa in it. This took 7 days on a dual G4 (2x 800MHz) Mac. That's with all of the computer's power focusing just on that. The time requires to complete the trees increases at a steep rate as one adds more taxa. If I was doing 200 taxa, it would have taken two or three months.
So this can offer a great service to many people.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The real world has a huge diversity of applications - most enterprise applications can't just be outsourced for maintenance, ongoing development and so-forth, unless by the people who developed it in the first place. Exodus and the many colocation facilities of the late 90s and early 00s wanted to offer services sort of like this, but it just doesn't work - they don't have the talent in shop to do it, and can't learn everybody else's apps.
If by "IT department" you mean IBM will operate databases, Apache web servers and J2EE app servers and other commodity applications in their own datacenters, then I do believe it, but again that is what a lot of high-service colos were doing several years back (many of whom went under). The economies of scale aren't there - the only people who would think they are are those who think of "IT" as some mythical blob of computer operators, and don't realize the mix of trained sysadmins, developers, and so-on that make up "IT".
And the ASP model - well, the problem there is that though the company that developed an app is well suited to actually host and operate the app, if a corporation adopts that model, then their apps will be hosted and operated all over hell and high water. I mean, this is fundamentally the web services model, and it's nice for a lot of things, but I don't think anybody believes it is going to make corporate IT departments go away and allow the centralization of all computing work into a big IBM datacenter. I'll believe that when I see it.
This is the exact same argument for ASPs and the "network computer". We all know how badly they failed. Replacing internal IT resources is not the answer. Businesses are slowly finding out that the cost of good IT staff is far lower than the overall benefit to the company's bottom line, even if the executive staff cannot accurately describe what they do.
That is what IBM hope's to capitalize on: Executives that can't grasp the day to day IT duties. IBM has become a very slick pitch company. They'll take the CEO and a few VPs golfing and say, "Sure you have staff, but we have EXPERT staff. We do this for a living. We're IBM. We've done this a million times." Nevermind that a company's IT staff are also experts in the field and have better knowledge of the company than IBM. IBM can woo upper management better than most internal IT management structures can.
If you've kept up on the cost savings offered by Linux thin clients, you know that (given application support) the money in switching to that model is/will be irresistable to IT departments. Dropping your labor costs (the bulk of a mature IT department's budget) by 50% by switching away from client-server is not uncommon.
An essential element that prompted the switch away from mainframes was, I believe, the fact that user interfaces outstripped the abilities of the slow networking in use at the time, and processing power requirements by both valid apps and bloated code exceeded the hot-I/O-but-not-so-hot-CPU design of mainframes.
Now the tables have turned -- gigabit, which shortly will be ubiquitous, is good enough to get full motion hi-res decompressed video to your desktop if needed, and Moore's law has given us 2.8 GHz CPUs to write our shopping lists with.
The costs of maintaining individual desktop systems, no matter how good the tools are, will remain immense. The money saved with centralized computing can be massive, and the inherent attributes of business desktop computing will, I believe, make the client/server model an aberration in history.
Steve
Yes this concept is Timesharing on Steroids, but check what this CEO guy has already done- sold the commodity hard-drive biz and gone for Linux in a big way. He is clearly not risk-averse and assuming we all agree Linux is A Good Thing (and certainly a way to beat on Sun and Microsoft) he is not stupid. So what is he doing here?
Posters who are focusing on the U-word (utility) need to see that IBM doesn't want Joe Citizen using this. The profit levels for dealing with the general public just aren't there for IBM- Big Blue is all about the corporate or government cash.
In a word, cost savings for premier customers, i.e. the kind of people who will run up huge MIPS but not on a constant daily basis. Scenarios that come to mind beyond the car engineering ones are banks/companies/bureaucracies who have monster End Of Month/End Of year processing but reduced needs otherwise, websites that have a lower average use threshold except when the Super Bowl commercial airs, and disaster recovery (keep your disks mirrored offsite, if a disaster occurs call IBM, get your virtual mainframe up and switch to the offsite array).
With IBM's sysplexing and workload algorithms in play, tying in 'outside' 'puters will waste few resources.
I suspect that IBM's ultimate goal is disk farms on user sites and CPUs at IBM's Grid Ranch. With the CPUs under IBM's care they can really drop the TCO for the machines themselves.
That reminds me, the real cost of operating mainframes nowadays beyond the staff is the third-party licenses for the support software- security, tape libraries, etc. That's because traditionally the software vendors license by MIPS on the machine, not MIPS actually used in your LPAR (logical partition, a carved out virtual machine on a mainframe). Whenever you increase the MIPS of your machine, the third-party vendors will bleed you dry (which ultimately loses IBM customers as they go to cheaper alternatives).
IBM is beating on these vendors by competing in their arena to drive TCO down, and is also trying to get them to meter their actual usage under z/OS. So this grid thing is just a logical extension of what they are trying to do to not get run over by Moore's Law and the cost of running The Big Box.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Maybe it's just that I'm reading at +4, but I'm suprised that nobody's mentioned Multics yet. The first thing that popped into my mind when I read "computing at a public utility" was Multics. I mean, the whole point of the system was to make computing a metetered utility. Not that any significant conclusions can be drawn from this, since Multics' failure had nothing to do with the business model, but more to do with them having overly ambitious goals for the project.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
A business will always choose a fixed cost over a variable cost. But there's many points of view.
From a system administrator's point of view:
I work in the data processing indstury, and we have a 12-way NUMA box as our mainframe. We moved from a 16-way SE-70 that we'd had for seven years earlier this year, and our software has already expanded to max out the capacity of the new NUMA unit - to the point where we've upgraded it several times.
We'd continue to expand if the perception was that we have unlimited resources.
From a business point of view:
Even if we could do our dp activities on someone else's mainframe, we would still have our system administration costs for systems that can't be moved out of the building, so our costs don't go down. We would also have to maintain in-house development machines, because we wouldn't want to pay someone else for the endless compiles that we would need while developing new software.
Additionally, we already have a huge, unamortized investment in fixed dp assets.
Currently, our systems process for 24 hours per day to meet our needs. If we were to do these same activities on a metered system, we would probably not have to process as long, but if costs are over $5,000 per month metered, it's not worth it, especially since there are no cost savings except for the cost of amoritization of our main hardware.
Corporations buy unmetered data lines because they don't want to have to deal with variable (and, in case of a slashdotting, extremely high and exteremely unstable) costs. Trying to sell a service that has a variable cost structure is good for a company, but buying a service that has a variable cost structure is bad for a company. The only time buying becomes good is when the company can't provide it for itself, as with electrical power and telecom. But it's easy to buy/build your own mainframe-class computer for less than $10,000.
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
After reading the article from the link, I was miffed about what this "on-demand computing" was and if it was any different than what's available today.
;)
In the USA today (yep, consulting on the road) The explain it like so: (Using an ordering web site as the example)
1. Each division of the company has it's own computers
2. When the orders increase in unit X, the computers deflect some of the processing to the corporate data network.
3. The newtork finds computers in other parts of the company that have excess capacity at that moment and routes the processing to them.
Side notes:
A. If the unit needs more processing than it can find inside the company, the data can be sent to other computers anywhere in the world, be processed and sent back.
B. If the economy turns sour, the unit might cut staff and let and outsourcing company handle all the order processing. Because computers would run on common standards, the division could give its data to an outsourcing firm.
I'm still miffed myself. Will this save money for companies or provide value that is worth paying for? It comes down to this, HW/SW/People/Real-Estate/Power(Diesel Generators) costs money (that's why you don't build your own datacenter) and technolgy gets old fast. If you truley can harness the X% of "wasted" computer power, in a "utility" fashion, then a miracle has occured. The technology of all technologies XML must have been mentioned somewhere and I missed it.
Article also says "grid computing" is a pre-cursor to on-demand computing. Sounds like we go back to green screens and mainframes to me. Oh wait, isn't that what the web is, but with fancy windows?
I'm a canadian!
We have dollar coins here. For those of you who don't know, it's called a "Loonie" because the coin features a Loon on one side.
A few years ago we also introduced a two dollar coin, called the "Toonie", whose name is really more of a bad joke.
It is in my opinion that with all the money our government saves by replacing the paper currency with coins we should recieve a tax credit for the cost of having all our pockets reinforced to carry the extra weight.
Those coins are damn heavy when you've got 20 bucks in loonies, and now they're talking about making a 5 dollar coin.
ATTN: Paul Martin, Finance Minister.
NO MORE FREAKIN COINS!!!!
What? Me? Worry?
I think you're a bit scattered in your argument here. Be careful in quoting Christensen without actually clearly identifying the substaining and the disruptive technology and carrying out the logic to understand the value networks.
Seems to me that IBM's top tier supercomputer customers do not actually need this the most. They have their big iron and they keep it occupied 24/7/365. If they were, then this would indeed be a substaining technology and they would care what Joe PC thinks. They wouldn't calling this a paradigm shift, they'd be meeting individually with Wal-Mart, Amex etc to show them their new "customer driven" value proposition.
I think they are actually trying to disrupt the high-end PC / Workstation corporate power user market. Why should you buy a $50K quad-cpu system that can run your FEA sim in 16 hours, when you could send the app and data to IBM, pay $500 and get it done in 30min? Especially if the nature of your work means that you would actually like to run 7 different ones on a given day but only once every two weeks.
The distributed model argument is also incomplete since obviously some apps do not lend themselves to it. If you have an engineering app that needs 64bit floating point precision and 4Gigs of (single image) RAM, you can't always just send it to the secretaries' PCs to run overnight as a screensaver. You can however upload it to IBM and they'll have system config that will meet your needs.