Weekly Review: The Power of Utility Computing

When Bill Gates set a new agenda for Microsoft around trustworthy computing in January this year, he defined it as "Computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony."

Read and React

"Prospective customers now recognize the concept of utility computing, but few have thought it through to its logical conclusion. They see it as equivalent to outsourcing, and imagine it as replacing their existing computers and software with some identical equipment running in the provider's own data center. Except that utilities don't work like that." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

Many others are now starting to catch on to this concept of computing as a bullet-proof utility service that you can virtually take for granted. In the past few years, IBM, HP and Sun have each invested in developing technologies for utility computing infrastructure, and with such a heavyweight trio of vendors pushing its merits, the message is starting to sink in.

But although prospective customers now recognize the concept, few have thought it through to its logical conclusion. They see utility computing as equivalent to outsourcing, and imagine it as replacing their existing computers and software with some identical equipment running in the provider's own data center.

Except that utilities don't work like that. The water company doesn't keep your water in a separate tank at the pumping station, labelled with your name. The power company isn't running a little generator just for you in its power station down the road. Everyone's water and power is mixed up with everyone else's, because that's the cheapest and most reliable way to organize provision.

Indeed, in today's deregulated electricity markets, it's not even as straightforward as pooling everyone's provision at a single, centralized location. Thanks to a nationwide power grid and a sophisticated electricity market, these days nobody actually knows exactly where their power is generated. It could just as easily come from a combination of several different sources, none of which are owned by the provider who sends you your monthly bill.

Enter Utility Computing
That's what utility computing will be like — much more like a grid of interlinked resources than a single outsourced data center. Though in terms of complexity, it will be more akin to the telecoms network, which carries many different forms of traffic and services, than the homogenized electricity grid. That's appropriate, of course, because it already runs on top of the telecoms network — the difference being that the utility computing grid will run at the level of applications infrastructure instead of down on the wire.

Adopting utility computing isn't going to be an either-or proposition. Most companies will start with selected services that meet particular needs. In some cases, just as householders in California today can generate their own solar power and sell it back to the grid, some customers will double-up as providers, offering resources where they have special skills or excess capacity. Naturally, all these arrangements will depend on a robust set of standards that guarantee interoperability, which is why it is so important to reach industry-wide agreement on the Web services stack.

Grid Computing Events

On Oct. 28 in Boston, ASPnews sister site Grid Computing Planet.com will sponser the Grid Computing Planet Conference & Expo Fall 2002. More information

With the emergence of this universal computing grid, there will be a need for a new breed of utility provider. Although companies and individuals will retain some local computing capabilities, there will be a growing opportunity for trusted neutral parties to operate and manage shared resources within the grid. This is a role that telecoms and hosting providers are well-suited to fulfill, but few have gone beyond the simplistic vision of outsourcing existing computing assets to a shared location.

BT Gets the Grid
Last week, U.K.-based telecoms carrier BT became one of the first to show it has grasped what the role of a utility provider needs to be in the Web services era. It announced a portfolio of hosted Web services offerings that fill the layers in between Internet infrastructure and business functionality, These new layers of application infrastructure will form the core of the utility computing grid.

BT has had its fair share of abortive entries into service provision in the past. Way back in March 1999, it launched BT BusinessManager, which aimed to deliver SAP software to small businesses for a low-cost monthly rental (see BT packages SAP for SMEs). Like many other telecoms giants, it has had to learn the hard way, from failed experiments like BT BusinessManager, that it is not the role of a telco to deliver business functionality. Their role always has been utility infrastructure, and with the advent of the utility computing grid, carriers like BT at last have the opportunity to find their proper place in the Web services ecosystem.

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