Utility computing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:40, 12 May 2006

Revision as of 17:22, 3 June 2006

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{{cleanup-date|August 2005}}

'''Utility computing''' is a [[business model]] whereby a service provider makes available [[computer]] resources to their clients and charges them for the usage rather than the [[hardware]]. Like you pay the [[natural gas|gas]] company or the [[electric]] company for its service based on usage, computing resources are metered and the user charged on that basis. A related term is [[On Demand Computing]] and [[grid computing]].

== History ==

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IBM conducted this kind of business offering computing power and database storage to big banks from its world wide data centers. As Intel increased the desktop power, the computer architecture has gone through terminal/mainframe, client/server, brower/middleware. Recently, it was re-initiated by Sun offering the [[Sun Grid]] service to consumers in 2000. HP introduced the Utility Data Center in 2001. Since 2000 many important computing companies have entered the market, but there have also been smaller organizations that have used utility computing. Some of these organizations use utility computing to help offset the cost of their own hardware, others use it to share the cost of resources within organizations. In December 2005, [[Alexa]] launched Alexa Web Search Platform, a Web search building tool for which the underlying power is utility computing. Alexa charges users for storage, utilization, etc. There is space in the market for other niche applications powered by utility computing.

== Enabling Utility Computing ==