Slashdot Mirror
The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing
icke writes "A quick overview of where the Economist thinks we are with the The Next Big Thing, also known as Stuff that doesn't work yet. Quoting: 'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of "adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes". IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls "on-demand computing". Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
She has enough money in her coffers (thanks to over 6000 layoffs translating to a $150M bonus last year) to give everyone she's ever met the finger, buy an island somewhere near the equator, and sip margaritas all day every day until she dies a miserable and lonely death.
She knows nothing about technology, and rather little about business. She only knows how to drain money. Don't expect to see HP change the face of computing with her in the captain's chair.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
The instructor couldn't explain it, so she brought in a marketing exec, who could only define it in terms of itself. "E-business on demand is about computing, on demand, for e-business." Sprinkle in a healthy dose of meaningless adjectives, and you get the picture.
I'll tell you, it's pervasive. Since then, I've not found one person who can give a cohesive definition at this company. And yet, it's supposed to be my driving force and ultimate goal.
yay.
It's just XML based data transfers with a bunch of new names, the nebulous part comes from all the comapnies selling everything, IBM and MS this is mostly you two, under this new brand name. Remember when everything from MS was .NET, "new from Microsoft Socks.NET (they have our logo on them). Now IBM is selling everything as onDemand, and HP is selling adaptive everything, regardless of what it used to be called or how tortured the path back to XML data transfers would be.
It really is a cool idea, and once implimented in everything, it will boost productivity, and ease communications, which is why all the enterprise sellers are selling the crap out of it. Either that or they thought that it was the e- everything that was driving the bubble.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I was at Thinking Machines (the company that invented massively parallel computing) a decade ago, and back then Danny Hillis talked frequently about "utility computing" -- the idea that your computations would know how to flow back to wherever it needed to be done. So you'd work on a desktop computer and the user interactive bits would run locally, harder parts would flow back to a big CPU in the basement, and the really hard parts could flow back to a city supercomputer, in a CPU equivalent of the power grid.
...
At a high level, it's a pretty simple idea, and very powerful.
At the detailed level, there are some amazingly hard problems to solve. Like, for example, how does software get split into parts that can be separated with minimal communications overhead, or how do you decide when a task would run more efficiently spread across a bunch of CPU's, or how do you keep running smoothly when a network outage causes 10% of your CPU's to drop off of the grid.
I suspect that the reason that all of the big companies are pitching this is that:
1) CPU's and operating systems have been commoditized by Intel/AMD/etc. and Linux, and they want to have a reason for you to buy bigger/better/more expensive systems.
2) Once one of them announced it, they all have to have a "response".
That being said, I think that what they're doing is going to be of real value to high-end customers. If you're running a farm of 5,000 servers, you really need the software to be self-healing, etc.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Nope, sorry. On-demand means that the computers can scale to cope with any load, in real-time.
Companies will not own their hardware, but rent it. If they suddenly need 3 times as much CPU, then they get it immediately, and only pay for what they use.
This is different than the current situation where a company must always keep enough hardware around to handle peak loads, which is almost never. And then, if they guessed wrong, they are still screwed.
It's really that simple, but hard to implement. IBM plans vast server farms, and large-scale software migration projects to handle cases where a customer uses 37 different databases, include 14 distinct versions of Oracle. Port all the databases to one version of Oracle or DB2, and suddenly you can scale your database capacity much more easily, and in real-time.
Well, I think they're flogging a bit more than just that: they're envisioning more widespread use of distributed computing. Distributed computing, according to these market leaders, will enable companies to come up with a working, marketable, and profitable way to sell computing power to other companies through "utility"-like means (think "metered", like electricity).
As for what that means for us *normal* people, maybe it means we can opt to make an extra penny or two running an IBM branded screensaver that runs computations for them (kind of like SETI@Home, just profitable). Or maybe it means we'll be forced to do the same for free if we use a Microsoft product =). Who knows?
dependent I/O bandwidth than on CPU crunching
Same deal. You suddenly need 43 database servers instead of just two, how will you cope? IBM's strategy is about EVERYTHING in a computer system, not just CPU. The hardware doesn't even live on the customer site.
Here's how the customer sees it:
Customer: Holy shit! We've got to process 43 times our normal data volume for the next 36 hours, starting right now! better call IBM.
Customer: Hello, IBM, we're to be handling 43 times the transactions that we're normally going to have, so we need a shitload of disk space, and somehow our applications need to hit the database without slowing under the load. Can you scale up what we're using for the next 36 hours?
IBM: No sweat, it's online for your right now.
The customer gets billed for the month at 36 hours of higher usage, and the rest at their normal low-usage rate.
As I said before, these systems don't run on the customer site. They are all hosted together. It will happen that a single machine will run systems for AT&T and MCI at the same time, and the mix can change dynamically. If you've got more questions, just ask. I can explain some of this better than the IBM marketers can.
Have you seen Xgrid? Apple's easy-to-use plug-in interface for distributed computing. See slashdot story here
- The Amazina Llama
I must confess I'm always puzzled by the insistence of computer manufacturers that computing as a utility is just around the corner and that will be the dominant way people and business will use computers. This was the original model that IBM tried to implement back in the 50s when computers were too expensive for all but the largest government and business organizations. Every year since then the claim is made both by IBM and the many upstarts who mysteriously decide they want to go after this phantasmal market that the reality of this is just a technology innovation away, remote terminals, modems, time sharing operating systems, interpreter technology, compiler technology, faster processing speed, larger storage capacity were all heralded as the last piece necessary to make this a reality. Yet, here we are in the early 21st century and, as a percentage of total computing power, we are no closer then we were half a century ago. In reality we are probably much further. Why do corporations think that this is a realistic business model? Do we have TV on demand? No, for the most part we own our televisions; pick and choose from the content we want. Do we have beer on demand? No, we go to the local bar when we want to buy it by the glass or get it from the liquor store when we want to enjoy it at home or with friends. Do we have books by demand? No, we don't by a book because we want to read a certain number of pages. We buy a book because it has something interesting that we want to read. There will of course always be outsourcing and their will always be hosting and its conceivable that these will be the dominant way to deliver IT services to companies, but these are not a computer utility. Why do people think we will ever get to the point where you my a certain number of CPU cycles or whatever the service metric is, and business will just get rid of their desktops, give everyone a terminal, and write a check once a month for the bill?
I think that a lot of people are missing that there are two concepts here. The first is grid computing, which is as far as I understand being able to offload processing to multiple computers. The second is ubiquitous computing, which is being able to use computers anywhere you want and access data anywhere you want in a natural fashion such that you're not even thinking about the fact that you're using a computer. See this google-cached page for an example. The two may be used together but are not dependent on each other.
The above statement isn't flame bait... I think the future roll of a computer will be to serve as the central control for all the little gizmos we continue to surround ourselves with. I'm just glad the rest of the market is finally defining a future roll for the PC instead of trying to convince me that I need a Tablet PC if I want productivity from my 'puter.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
time-sharing: 1. Computing The automatic sharing of processor time so that a computer can serve several users or devices concurrently, rapidly switching between them so that each user has the impression of continuous exclusive use.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Well, if you have a decent provider (like, I don't know, IBM? :), then they already offer burstable bandwidth and multiple ISP's to handle things like that. Bandwidth was on-demand before they'd even coined the term.
As for storage, carving out a new LUN on a SAN or NAS storage unit is simple compared to shifting processing jobs around.
What on-demand is about is when your web site gets a huge spike of hits (/. effect, anyone?), you can immediately blast out several new web server (or application server, or database server) images and double your serving capacity near instantly.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10950
So no, the merger did not work "as planned" unless you plan for losing big revenue.
Translate Hindu to english?
Can you translate from Christian to Hebrew? How about Muslim to Danish? Mormon to Finnish maybe?
Hindu is a religion, Hindi is a language, get your Xenophobic facts straight before you open your big mouth.
IOException - Can't Speak
I forgot, in the bibliography, the three things that define an agent are proactivity, autonomy and reactivity. Mobility is not compelling. Sitting in front of my computer I can do a lot of work without needing to actually go to every place google points out, an agent can help me a lot without moving, even can save a lot of work for me.
DON'T PANIC