Hardware vendors inch forward on utility computing | ZDNet
One of the more inefficient aspects of IT provisioning is that enterprises must often overbuild the compute and storage capacity of their systems to accommodate periods of peak demand, with a lot of bandwidth going to waste during off-peak times. Such overcapacity and underutilization can become an expensive proposition. On the heels of a recession that has devastated the IT business and inspired more disciplined technology buying, most vendors have realized that they risk losing business unless they can deliver on a utility-like model, in which customers pay only for what they use.
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According to HP's van der Zweep, if the commonalities needed to successfully defer a Web request to a daemon on another system are complicated, the deferral of an enterprise application's workload to another system is exponentially more difficult. Not only must the software be capable of a utility-like response where it can seek additional computing resources on the network or the Internet (which most applications are incapable of), but it's very likely that the computing environment behind the resources it's looking for will have to be a direct match to the computing environment that it's running on. According to van der Zweep, "it's not just 'go out and find me a copy of SAP that can take this request.' It's 'go out and find me a copy of SAP running on this specific operating system with those specific patches with that version of Java on top of a certain processor architecture.' "
......Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos already sees a future without too much stack-related complexity. Suggesting that there might come a time when Java compute time is a commodity, Papadopoulos said, "We've got to build systems that are far more regular at the network layer so that when I walk into a data center, I can say, 'Oh, this looks very familiar, it looks just like the one I was in yesterday because it's built out of the same architecture and the same sort of organizing principles.' "
Currently, however, Papadopoulos is bearish on utility computing. "Right now, utility computing is fool's gold. If you don't go and work on the systemic issues, you actually end up in this perverse thing where if someone asks you to double the size of your utility, you have a failure," said Papadopoulos. "If you don't properly get the architecture right underneath, you'll in fact diverge on your operating costs. It should be the other way. You should be able to say 'Hey, I'm twice as big and I am just motoring along in terms of being able to deliver incremental cycles.' Incremental cycles should be practically free."
Papadopoulos insists that some form of middleware is necessary for compute time to be delivered like electricity. But before that can happen, he added, the installed base of enterprise applications must catch up to developers who, for the most part, are already developing at the middleware layer.
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In some ways, the SETI@home screensaver sets a precedent for a middleware-driven utility with accountability baked in. Systems that run the screensaver, thereby offering their spare compute resources to the SETI@home grid, don't have to be running on a specific operating system on a specific type of processor. Rather, the SETI@home servers divide the compute workload into 0.25 megabyte work units that are then parceled out to available systems. Although billing isn't a function, SETI@home has an accounting system for how much work those computers are doing.
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According to Anderson, the initial idea behind United Devices, a company where he was once CTO, was to build just such a billable compute utility based on the SETI@home technology. But, once United Devices' customers learned of the shortcomings of the SETI-like approach, the company had to shoot for a slightly less ambitious goal. "Our attempt to do a billable model didn't work," said Anderson. "One reason is the sort of companies that need that kind of computing power. For example, pharmaceutical companies will use computers to predict what chemicals will be effective against diseases. The problem is that if you run one of these programs that are assessing chemicals, then you reveal your intellectual property [the list of chemicals] and the results are impossible to hide on the computer doing the computations. The pharmaceutical companies backed out because of security concerns. Now, United Devices is concentrating on enterprises interested in the same principle, but within a company [instead of turning to the public]."
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Further evidence that a middleware-like software infrastructure is where utility computing will have to go before it's a reality is the successor to the current SETI@home software design. Anderson is confident that the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ("BOINC" for short) will represent an architectural advance. "[While] SETI@home combines infrastructure with the application... BOINC is developing middleware that separates those two things," said Anderson. "People would download the core client and then that client downloads and runs applications. This way, it's possible for a project to add, change, or update the applications that are running [on the distributed systems]."
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"The whole idea of completely and fluidly sharing computing power carries with it a set of technical problems that aren't resolved right now," said Anderson. "But this is precisely the problem that the Global Grid Forum (GGF) is addressing." When I mentioned the idea of HP's computon to Anderson, he chuckled, "The GGF has subcommittees devoted to this idea of the economics of computer sharing. There's a tendency for people to come up with old ideas and give them new names."
Will vendors like HP solve the utility problem before the GGF does? "The GGF is doing more talking than anything else because of competing interests of the vendors involved," said Anderson. "I suspect that companies like HP and Sun will get there first."
