Information Manager Journal

Utility computing awaits its own standards

Techdirt: "Gartner has finally realized that all this talk about utility computing and grid computing is really just a way for IT suppliers to lock in their customers." Only until utility computing becomes standardized. Many efforts are now underway. I don't believe that vendor lock-in is a given, over time, after the newness of utility computing wears off. (Interesting to see that this Gartner utterance comes from Betsy Burton, who I knew when she was involved with the effort to standardize SQL back in the days when Microsoft needed Sybase's help to even get in the SQL server game.)

DCML: A utility computing markup language

From CRN: EDS, Opsware, 20 Other Companies Back New Open Standard For Utility Computing. "DCML, an XML-based standard, describes what is contained within a data center and how that environment is constructed to enable systematic reproduction, rebuilding or reprovisioning of any portion of the data center environment." Here's the press release. Most interesting participant: Akamai. Marc Andriessen (Opsware) will no doubt helps boost this new group. Honorable mention: Tibco and Marimba. Most prominent absentees: IBM, Sun and Microsoft. The press release says the new standard also has the support of "several Fortune 1000 [customer] companies" although only USA Today (part of Gannett Corp.) is mentioned by name.

Overprovisioning the data center

John Fowler, Chief Technology Officer, Sun Microsystems, speaking about Web services, grid computing and the autonomic enterprise, predicts the same kind of overprovisioning in enterprise data centers that we're now seeing in the service provider industry: "Do civil engineering in your deployment. Model loads, and multiply your system requirements by a 25 to 30 percent margin of error, then just double that, in case Oprah mentions your book."

What is Microsoft's utility computing strategy?

Another question I have for the Microsoft PDC: What is Microsoft's strategy for utility computing? This is also known as grid computing, and it is already virtualizing computing resources on a global scale. I don't hear anything about this in the runup to the PDC conference. If not, why not? Another way to ask the question might be, in which ways do technologies such as .Net remoting approximate utility computing, and in what ways do they not? And how does this compare to the J2EE way of doing this?