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Utility Computing -- What Does It Mean to You?

Posted by Cliff on from the cutting-out-the-buzz-and-trimming-the-hype dept.

lastpub asks: "With all the vendors out there touting the latest industry buzzword of 'Utility Computing', I'm curious to find out what developers and IT professionals actually think about what that means. Each vendor has it's own message, and some of them have very nebulous descriptions. When you hear the term 'Utility Computing', what do you think?"

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. We're not ready for Utility Computing yet. by cperciva · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's the primary requirement of a utility? It has to work. If you turn the water faucet on, you expect to get water; if you plug a lamp into a wall socket, you expect electricity; when you pick up your phone, you expect to hear a dial tone.

    Computing simply hasn't reached that point. When people choose web hosting, they don't choose on the basis of how many dollars each GB of bandwidth costs; they choose on the basis of security, reliability, customer service, and generally reputation.

    Utility computing would be nice, but we're simply not ready yet.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  2. Scalable resources by DrPepper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nobody seems to have given a decent answer yet, so I'll give my two-cents worth.

    To me, utility computing is quite a generic term, but generally means computing resources on demand. It's the ability to vary the resources available to you within a very short space of time. Like the ability to just turn a tap on and off.

    There are various ways of delivering that; some companies allow you to install a machine with more processors than you need, but only pay for the ones you use. So you install a 32 node machine, but only pay for 16 processors. Later, as your demand increases, you can just turn on the extra processors. You could do the same with RAM, disc space etc. Obviously though you pay a premium for the convienience.

    Another way of deliverying this is through remote resources. You effectively outsource your computing resource; as you need more resources you phone up your supplier and they provide the additional resources from their hardware pool - already setup and ready to go.

    At the moment it seems to be of most interest to large data centres.